The use of a factor-analytic procedure for assessing the validity of an employee safety climate model

This paper assesses the validity of a safety climate measure proposed by Zohar (Safety climate in industrial organizations: Theoretical and applied implications. J. Appl. Psychol. 65(1), 96-101, 1980.) on an American sample of production workers. Using LISREL, confirmatory factor analyses were carried out to test the hypothesis of similar variance-covariance structures (validation of the proposed model). The originally proposed climate model was not supported by the data. An exploratory factor analytic algorithm is then discussed as a means of refining the climate model. A smaller safety climate model was then extracted from the data, and comparisons were made for two groups of employees (accidents versus no accidents). Factorial invariance tests were conducted to test the hypotheses of similar factor patterns, equal units of measurement, equal accuracy of measurement, and equal covariance across factors, between the two groups. The results indicated that the climate structures did not differ between the two groups of interest, subsequently providing a valid and reliable climate measure across the groups. Groups were then compared on climate scores, with differences in climate perception being detected between the groups.