Staying silent about safety issues: Conceptualizing and measuring safety silence motives

• Safety silence can have relationship, climate, issue, or job-based motives.
• A 17-item measure was developed to assess the four types of safety silence motives.
• Initial evidence for the validity of the safety silence motives measure was found.
• Safety silence motives are related to several workplace safety constructs.
• Issue and job-based safety silence explain unique variance in safety performance.

Communication between employees and supervisors about safety-related issues is an important component of a safe workplace. When supervisors receive information from employees about safety issues, they may gain otherwise-missed opportunities to correct these issues and/or prevent negative safety outcomes. A series of three studies were conducted to identify various safety silence motives, which describe the reasons that employees do not speak up to supervisors about safety-related issues witnessed in the workplace, and to develop a tool to assess these motives. Results suggest that employees stay silent about safety issues based on perceptions of altering relationships with others (relationship-based), perceptions of the organizational climate (climate-based), the assessment of the safety issue (issue-based), or characteristics of the job (job-based). We developed a 17-item measure to assess these four motives, and initial evidence was found for the construct and incremental validity of the safety silence motives measure in a sample of nurses.