How Organizational Support Can Cultivate a Multilevel Safety Climate in the Construction Industry

Abstract

10Safety climate has a positive impact on safety performance in the construction industry; it is a 11 multilevel phenomenon that can be formed at organization and group levels especially in large 12 organizations with multilevel management structure. The study investigates how organizational 13 support cascades down to cultivate group-level safety climate at two time points over a two-year 14 period through the relationship with organization-level safety climate, supervisory safety-specific 15 transformation leadership, and co-worker support in a large US-based construction contractor. 16Structural equation modeling analysis on data from an online survey among 284 construction 17 professionals shows, different from prior research, that organizational support at one point in time 18does not directly predict subsequent group-level safety climate. Instead, it affects group-level safety 19 climate through the mediation effect of supervisory safety-specific transformation leadership and 20 organizational-level safety climate, and its moderation effect on the relationship between co-worker 21 support and group-level safety climate. Importantly, the results also suggest that safety-specific 22 transformational leadership may be an even more important predictor of group-level safety climate 23 than organizational-level safety climate and co-worker support. These results imply that organizations 24 support could focus on empowering leaders to demonstrate safety-specific transformational leadership 25 behaviors for the sake of enhancing group-level safety climate. 26 KEYWORDS 27Organizational support, safety climate, safety-specific transformational leadership, co-worker support, structural 28 equation modeling 29 30 31To explore the relationship between safety climate and safety performance, many studies in 58 construction have focused on the organization as the unit of analysis (e.g., He et al.,2016). Yet, 59organizations are social systems that are constructed through interdependencies between individuals 60 and subunits across an organizational hierarchy (Kozlowski & Klein, 2000). This hierarchy creates 61 micro-and macro-levels of safety climate. Consistent with the idea that organizations are multilevel 62 systems, Zohar and Luria (2005) proposed and tested a multilevel model of safety climate that 63 includes organization-level and group-level safety climate in a manufacturing context. Organization-64 level safety climate (OSC) arises from the formal organizational-wide policies and procedures 65 imposed by top management, while group-level safety climate (GSC) arises from the safety practices 66 associated with the implementation of organizational policies and procedures by front-line supervisors 67 in each workgroup. In particular, Zohar and Luria (2005) proved that OSC and GSC are two 68 distinguishable constructs. Further, the researchers found that the positive effect of OSC on safety 69 behaviors is fully mediated by GSC. The results provided a new multilevel approach to investigating 70 safety climate. 71 In ...

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