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The organizational and safety climate inventory (OSCI): reliability and validity

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DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.1276.7446

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 The OSCI: Reliability 1

Running head: THE OSCI: RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY

The Organisational Safety Climate Inventory (OSCI):

reliability and validity

Maria da Conceição Baptista

Centro de Investigação e Intervenção Social, Lisbon, Portugal

Sílvia Silva and Luísa Lima

Centro de Investigação e Intervenção Social, Lisboa, Portugal

Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa, Lisboa, Portugal

 The OSCI: Reliability 2

Abstract

The study of safety climate emerged along with the evidence that human and managerial

factors play an important role in the occurrence of most accidents. In this article, we present

two validation studies for the Organisational Safety Climate Inventory (OSCI) (Silva et al.,

2003), a recent instrument proposed for the simultaneous evaluation of organisational and

safety climate in industrial organisations. The first study (N=32) shows a very good test–

retest reliability, after 5 weeks. The second study (N=111) tested the convergent validity of

OSCI using the Safety Climate Measure (Dedobbeleer & Béland, 1991) and the

discriminant validity using the Organisational Satisfaction Scale (Lima, Vala & Monteiro,

1994). Data supported a satisfactory convergent and discriminant validity of Safety Climate

dimensions. Overall, the results indicated that OSCI is reliable and valid as a measure of

organisational and safety climate.

 The OSCI: Reliability 3

The organisational and safety climate inventory: reliability and validity

Since the 80’s there has been growing awareness that organisational and human

factors rather than purely technological failures have an important role for understanding

accidents in high reliability industries (Hale & Hovden, 1998; Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld,

1999). This fact contributed to the importance given to the concept of safety climate and for

the proliferation of survey instruments to assess and understand how the members of an

organisation perceive and evaluate safety (Pidgeon, 1991,1998; Guldenmund, 2000; Zohar,

2003).

After Zohar´s pioneer work in 1980, the number of scales in this area has increased,

probably due to their importance as predictive measures. Safety climate instruments allow

to identify weaknesses and intervention priorities in order to prevent the failure of the

system (Flin, Mearns, O´Connor, & Bryden, 2000). Many studies emphasised the role of

safety climate in the prevention of work accidents and to increase workers safety

behaviours (Neal & Griffin, 2003). But in spite of all this psychological research in

industrial safety, disputes still rage about how safety climate should be measured. For

example, regarding the common set of core features of safety climate, Dedobbeleer &

Béland (1998) argue that two factors, namely, management commitment and worker

involvement, had been replicated across studies.

In fact, although the number of scales and climate features multiplies, there are some

common themes assessed in safety climate questionnaires used in the industrial sectors

(chemical, transport, construction, and manufacturing). Some of these dimensions are

management commitment, safety system, risk evaluation, work pressure, work competence,

safety arrangements, safety procedures and training (Cooper, 1998; Flin et al., 2000;

Guldenmund, 2000). Nevertheless, the existing instruments vary significantly in many

 The OSCI: Reliability 4

aspects – content, style, statistical analysis, sample composition, industry and country of

origin (Flin et al., 2000) and only few reveal significant psychometrical qualities

(Guldenmund, 2000). In most cases, the validation of safety climate questionnaires has

been undertaken through comparison with retrospective accident data either in terms of

self-reported accidents or accident rates for work sites (Flin et al., 2000).

This field is also characterised by few studies aiming to test comprehensive

theoretical models. In the last years there has been an interest in studying safety climates

considering different levels of analysis (Hoffman &Stetzer, 1996; Melia, 1999; Zohar,

2000) but few have approached empirically safety climate antecedents. Within this

framework the study of Neal & Griffin (2000) is one exception, in their approach

organisational climate was considered and tested as a determinant of the safety climate.

Results revealed that organisational climate predicts safety climate, which in turn is related

to safety performance. However in this study the analyses was reduced to a relation of

strength between the organisational and safety climate, since the two instruments had

different backgrounds it was not possible to test more specific relations.

Considering this body of literature and the importance of the safety climate, we

developed and proceed to the validation of the Organisational and Safety Climate Inventory

(OSCI) (Silva, Lima & Baptista, 2003). The survey instrument adopts an integrative

approach by exploring the association between organisational climate and organisational

safety climate and describing employees’ perceptions, attitudes and beliefs about

organisational safety climate, organisational safety practices and personal involvement with

safety. In previous studies OSCI revealed a good construct validity, internal consistency

and predictive validity (Silva, Lima & Baptista, 2003). The main goal of this instrument is

to be useful as an organisational diagnostic and intervention tool of organisational safety

 The OSCI: Reliability 5

climate, enabling the evaluation of the organisational climate and safety climate in

industrial organisations.

In this paper we present the test-retest reliability study and the convergent and

discriminant validity study of OSCI.

Study 1

The goal of this study is to analyse the temporal stability of OSCI. Safety climate and

organisational climate are two concepts that refer to more or less stable characteristics of

organisations. Therefore, test-retest reliability is an adequate validation procedure for this

instrument. High levels of association between two applications of this measure are

expected.

Method

Participants

Thirty-two workers employed in a wide range of occupations (e.g. clerical,

managerial, professional and manual labour) were recruited from 6 organisations in

different sectors (e.g. industry, construction, transportation, public administration). The

participants had worked in the organisation for at least one year and were representative of

two hierarchical levels (bottom and middle). Twenty-two participants were male and ten

were female with ages ranging from 20 to 45 years old (Mode= 26-30 years old) and with

different education levels (from 9th grade to graduates).

 The OSCI: Reliability 6

Instruments

The test-retest reliability study was conducted using the Organisational and Safety

Climate Inventory (OSCI).

This inventory includes two questionnaires and comprises 78 items, presented in a

Likert – type scale of seven points.

The first questionnaire evaluates Organisational Climate and comprises 22 items.

This questionnaire assesses perceptions about organisational norms and values through four

content dimensions (support, goals, rules and innovation). A strength index was developed

for the Organisational Climate questionnaire corresponding to the average of all

dimensions.

The second questionnaire focuses on Safety Climate and includes four main scales:

safety climate content scale; safety as an organisational value scale; organisational safety

practices scale and personal involvement with safety scale. The first scale corresponds to

the safety climate content (e.g. innovation, rules) and the second scale assesses safety as a

general organisational value, thus both represent the evaluative part of the questionnaire.

The third and fourth scales are more descriptive and refer to perceptions about

organisational safety practices (e.g. safety training, quality of safety communication) and

about the personal involvement with safety (e.g. safety pride, safety internalisation) (for a

more detailed description see Silva, Lima & Baptista, 2003). A strength index was

developed for the Safety Climate questionnaire and for each scale. The safety climate

strength index comprises the average of all the safety climate scales. The scales strength

index correspond to the average of the items for each scale.

This instrument has good reliability, table 1 present OSCI Safety Climate structure

and the corresponding results for internal consistency.

 The OSCI: Reliability 7

Table 1

Safety Climate Questionnaire: structure and Cronbach´s alpha

Scale Dimensions Number Silva et al., Study 2

of Items 2003
Content of safety Support 4 .78 .75
climate Goals 2 .72 .75
Innovation 2 .72 .64
Rules 3 .79 .71
Safety as an Safety as an organisational 5 .83 __
organisational value value
Organisational Management safety activities 3 .77 .78
safety practices Safety Training 3 .82 .80
Safety effectiveness 4 .77 .72
Quality of safety 4 .72 .68
communication
Effects of required work pace 4 .77 .84
on safety
Organisational learning from 4 .79 .77
accidents
Personal Personal Commitment to 3 .73 .64
involvement with safety
safety Safety Internalisation 2 .75 .20
Safety Pride 3 .78 .76

Procedure

The 32 participants completed the integral version of OSCI and were re-tested five

weeks after the initial assessment to assess test-retest reliability.

 The OSCI: Reliability 8

Results

To examine the stability of the questionnaire over time Pearson correlations were

calculated for the results obtained in the two applications of OSCI. The results for the

organisational climate questionnaire, as shown in Table 2, demonstrate very good test-retest

reliability with correlations raging from 0.78 to 0.94.

Table 2

Test – Retest correlations for Organisational climate

Organisational Climate r N p
Support .88 27 .000
Innovation .79 27 .000
Goals .94 27 .000
Rules .78 26 .000

Organisational Climate Strength .92 26 .000

The correlations for the safety climate content dimensions (see Table 3) are also very

high varying from 0.72 to 1.00.

Table 3

Test – Retest correlations for Safety climate and for Safety as an organisational value scales

Safety Climate Content and Value r N p

Support .96 26 .000
Innovation .96 27 .000
Goals 1.00 27 .000
Rules .72 27 .000

Safety Climate Strength .98 26 .000

Safety as an organisational value .88 27 .000
 The OSCI: Reliability 9

With respect to the results obtained for organisational safety practices (see Table 4),

the lowest correlation was 0.59 for management safety activities and the highest was 0.97

for effects of required work pace on safety, thus also revealing a very good reliability.

Table 4

Test – retest correlations for Organisational safety practices Scale

Organisational safety practices r N p
Management safety activities .59 27 .001
Effects of required work pace on safety .97 27 .000
Safety training .85 27 .000
Safety effectiveness .96 27 .000

Quality of safety communication .67 27 .001

Organisational learning .89 27 .001
Organisational Safety Practices Strength .89 27 .001

Finally a similar pattern of results (see Table 5) was obtained for the personal

involvement dimensions with correlations between 0.78 and 0.99.

Table 5
Test – Retest correlations for Personal involvement with safety Scale
Personal involvement with safety r N p

Personal commitment to safety .99 26 .000

Safety pride .78 27 .000
Safety internalisation .81 27 .000
Personal involvement with safety Strength .91 26 .000
 The OSCI: Reliability 10

Concluding, the results demonstrate that OSCI has very good test- retest reliability

for all the dimensions.

Study 2

The goal of this study is to determine the convergent and discriminant validity of

OSCI, i.e. we aimed to show that OSCI results are more related to other safety climate

measures than to other distinct variables. The Safety Climate Measure (Dedobbeleer &

Béland, 1991) was used as convergent criteria and the Organisational Satisfaction Scale

(Lima, Vala & Monteiro, 1994) was used as divergent criteria.

Method

Participants

The sample includes 111 workers from 7 organisations in different sectors (e.g.

industry, construction, transportation, and public administration), working in that

organisation for at least one year. Sixty-seven participants were male and forty-one female

aged from 20 to 60 years old (Mode= 26-30 years old) and with different levels of

education (from 4th grade to graduates).

Instruments

The Safety Climate Questionnaire of OSCI, already described in study 1, was used

for this study. The reliability for this instrument was again determined and the results

obtained for this sample (see Table 1) revealed good internal consistency with alphas

ranging from 0.64 to 0.84. However, one exception was found for safety internalisation that

presented an unexpected alpha of 0.20.

 The OSCI: Reliability 11

To assess the convergent validity of OSCI we used the Safety Climate Measure of

Dedobbeleer & Béland (1991). This measure was based on previous scales (e.g. Brown and

Holmes’ safety climate model, 1986) and reduced through LISREL techniques to two

dimensions, namely, (1) management’s commitment to safety and (2) worker’s

involvement in safety. The first dimension comprises five items and measures management

commitment to safety in terms of management’s safety attitudes and practices (e.g. “How

much do supervisors and other top management seem to care about your safety?). The

worker’s involvement dimension has four items and it is related with workers physical risk

perception (e.g.” Is taking risks part of the job?”) and worker’s perceptions of control (e.g.”

How much control do you feel you have yourself over what happens to your safety on the

job?”). Different types of scale were used to measure these items (e.g. four-point rating

scale ranging from “very important” to “not at all important”, dichotomised questions

(Yes/No) and five-point rating scale ranging from “always” to “never”). A global index was

produced, corresponding to the average of all items, in order to use more equivalent

measures in the final analyses. In the present sample, alpha reliabilities were 0.66 for the

global scale, 0.66 for management’s commitment to safety and 0.45 for the worker’s

involvement in safety.

To assess the discriminant validity we used six items from the Organisational

Satisfaction Scale (Lima, Vala and Monteiro, 1994). This instrument includes eight items,

seven refer to specific aspects of the work (e.g. promotion prospects, salary) and one

general item (“ Considering every aspects in your workplace, you feel...”). All the items

were answered in a 7-point Likert-type scale (1= extremely dissatisfied to 7 = extremely

satisfied). The items were averaged to form a global index of satisfaction. The authors

report good reliability for this measure, and in our sample the alpha obtained was 0.84.
 The OSCI: Reliability 12

Procedure

Participants completed the Safety Climate Measure (Dedobbeleer & Béland, 1991),

the Organisational Satisfaction Scale (Lima, Vala and Monteiro, 1994) and the OSCI’s

Organizational Safety Climate questionnaire, namely, organisational safety climate content,

organisational safety practices and personal involvement with safety scales.

Results

To test the convergent and divergent validity of the questionnaire the correlation

coefficients were calculated for all the indexes (see Table 6).

The Safety Climate scales as well as its overall score showed good convergent

validity with Safety Climate Measure, with the exception of Personal Involvement. On the

other hand, considering the significant correlations obtained with the satisfaction scale, the

questionnaire demonstrated a relative lack of discriminant validity within the same scales.

A further analysis was made in order to analyse the significance of the differences

between the corresponding correlations for the convergent and the discriminant measures.

The results revealed significant differences between the correlations of the global

OSCI index, the global Safety Climate index and satisfaction index (Z= 2.10, p<0.05).

Thus, the OSCI global index is more related to the global index for Safety Climate rather

than with the satisfaction index, which suggests that the scale has some discriminant power.

A similar result was obtained for the organisational safety practices index that was found to

be more related to the Global result in the Safety Climate measure (Z= 2.61, p<0.01) than

to the satisfaction scale.

 The OSCI: Reliability 13

Table 6

Convergent and discriminant correlations for Organisational safety climate (N =102)

Safety Climate Measure Organisational

Global Management Worker Satisfaction Scale
OSCI commitment involvement
Global .72 .68 .44 .53
(.000) (.000) (.000) (.000)
Safety .64 .65 .31 .50
Content Strength (.000) (.000) (.000) (.000)
Organisational .71 .62 .53 .47
Practices Strength (.000) (.000) (.000) (.000)
Personal .50 .47 .33 .44
Involvement with (.000) (.000) (.001) (.000)
safety Strength

However, the observed pattern of higher correlations between the two safety climate

measures than with satisfaction is not observed for the correlations with the personal

involvement with safety index. In fact, there are almost no differences between the relation

of this index with the global, the management and the worker indexes in comparison with

the relation with the satisfaction. One possible explanation for this unexpected result may

be that this scale is more focused on the individual, as is the case of the satisfaction with the

organisation. In the case of the worker involvement from the Safety Climate measure, this

dimension is more related with individual perception about the whole work environment,

specifically about the collective attitude and behaviour concerning safety as a value and

organizational safety practices, rather than with the perception and report of the worker’s

personal attitudes and actions. Another possible reason may rely on the low alpha reliability

obtained for Dedobbeeler & Beland worker’s involvement in safety dimension.

 The OSCI: Reliability 14

Our results evidence a moderate convergent validity for the Personal involvement

with safety, although this scale demonstrated a low correlation with the related dimension

of the Worker’s involvement in safety.

In conclusion, the findings from study 2 provide support for the convergence between

OSCI’s Safety Climate Questionnaire and Safety Climate Measure (Dedobbeeler & Béland,

1991). The two measures were highly correlated with each other in terms of global and

specific dimensions. Furthermore, OSCI reveal satisfactory discriminant validity especially

for the global index and for the organisational safety practices scale.

General Discussion

The two studies presented here contributed to a further study of an instrument already

studied regarding its internal consistency, construct and predictive validity. Overall,

findings provide evidence of the inventory’s stability, convergent and discriminant validity.

These results suggest that OSCI is a reliable and valid instrument for assessing the

association between the organisational and safety climate of an organisation.

Finally, it is important to remark that OSCI is an organisational diagnostic tool that

should not be used as a selection instrument in terms of human resources practices. One of

the main applications of this inventory is to identify key areas for intervention in the area of

safety climate enabling the definition and implementation of changes specifically related

with organisational safety practices. This instrument also allows a better integration of

safety practices on organisational climate and safety climate.

In the future it is important to develop further studies in order to explore all the

potentialities of this instrument, for instance the relation with other important variables like

organisational learning from accidents.

 The OSCI: Reliability 15

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the Foundation for Science and Technology through

the PRAXIS Program, PRAXIS/P/PSI/13042/1998.

We would like to express our gratitude to all the organizations that allowed us to

collect the data we needed to conduct this study.

 The OSCI: Reliability 16

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