Developing an inter-organizational safety climate instrument for the construction industry

In the construction industry, recent literature has promoted a design for safety approach that discusses the benefits of considering safety from the very start of the project lifecycle. With this approach, non-construction personnel, such as owners and designers, need to work alongside constructors and subcontractors to consider safety during design and procurement stages of a project. This is a difficult process, particularly with the degree of fragmentation in the industry. Safety climate survey instruments have been developed to identify these sources of fragmentation among stakeholder groups, but most of these tools are directed toward on-site construction personnel. This paper describes the development of an inter-organizational safety climate instrument for measuring attitudes toward safety of construction industry stakeholders including owners, designers, construction managers, and subcontractors. Overall, the measurement model demonstrated a good fit with the data based on a confirmatory factor analysis. Therefore, the survey instrument provides a useful tool for researchers and practitioners to identify the sources of fragmentation in attitudes of construction project personnel toward worker safety that can affect occupational health and safety within the industry.