Safety climate and fatigue have differential impacts on safety issues: Safety climate, fatigue, and safety issues

Safety climate describes a collection of perceptions and practices that encapsulate the general attitude toward safety within an organization. A better safety climate presumably leads to a safer and more effective workplace. However, there are many contributing factors to safety outcomes, and these variables may interact with the safety climate to affect actual safety behaviors.

This study examined fatigue as a possible moderator between safety climate and safety outcomes, including actual safety incidents reported, near-misses experienced, and safety underreporting. Structural equation modeling explored this question using a large dataset (N > 11,000) gathered from naval personnel who operate in a challenging work environment and must regularly contend with the consequences of fatigue.

Results indicated a differential effect on the relationship between safety climate and safety outcomes; that is, safety climate affected underreporting the most, followed by likelihood of experiencing a near-miss, but had the weakest impact on actual safety reporting. Conversely, fatigue had a comparable impact across all safety outcomes, both directly as a moderating influence when accounting for safety climate.

These findings suggest that safety climate may differentially affect safety outcomes, but fatigue appears to have the same impact across different types of safety issues despite their severity.