Interdisciplinary collaborations facilitate safety climate research

The Mary Kay O'Connor Process Safety Center has collaborated with and supported faculty and doctoral students in their research in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Texas A&M University for more than a decade. This collaboration is the result of the recognition that organizational scientists have knowledge and skills that can address the human side of workplace and process safety. This paper reviews some of the research that has grown out of this long and fruitful collaboration and provides specific practical recommendations about building a state-of-the-science process safety climate assessment program. Based on a series of studies resulting from this collaboration, some important conclusions include: ensuring safety climate measures are neither contaminated nor deficient and assessing safety climate more than once a year. This paper demonstrates how academic-corporate partnerships and engineering-social science partnerships can create useful and important information to support environment, safety, and health (EHS) practice.