Safety climate and safety outcomes: A meta-analytic comparison of universal vs. industry-specific safety climate predictive validity

Previous research has demonstrated that safety climate is a robust predictor of safety-related outcomes. However, there is little consensus about the optimal strategy to measure safety climate. One of the main issues has been whether safety climate measures should be universal or industry-specific. As such, this study was designed to examine the criterion-related validity of universal and industry-specific safety climate measures by conducting a meta-analytic comparison of their relationships with a variety of safety-related outcomes (i.e. safety behaviour, risk perceptions, accidents and injuries, and other adverse events). With 120 independent samples (N = 81,213), we found that the industry-specific safety climate measures displayed better predictive power when predicting safety behaviour and risk perceptions than the universal safety climate measures. On the other hand, the universal safety climate measures displayed better predictive power when predicting other adverse events (but not accidents and injuries) than the industry-specific safety climate measures. We discuss these findings in light of the intended use of organisational safety climate surveys.