Organizational climate and safety climate are nearly inseparable in shared living and working spaces

Safety climate represents a shared collection of attitudes, perceptions, and best practices concerning safety behaviors within an organization. Among the many antecedents that potentiate good safety climate conditions, a reasonably robust predictor has been organizational climate. This construct represents a more comprehensive view of attitudes beyond just the safety-related behaviors that make up safety climate. Although this comparison has been explored across different industrial settings, what happens to the relationship between organizational climate and safety climate when people live and work within the same environment? Several industrial settings would satisfy this criterion, including mining, oil drilling, nascent spacefaring missions, and maritime operations, with the latter representing a unique context where people of various job types must work and live together for extended periods of time.

The current study thus explored the relationship between organizational climate and safety climate and safety issues using a large sample of U.S. Navy personnel (N > 11,000) from more than 100 ships at sea.

Structural equation modeling revealed a strong relationship between organizational climate and safety climate (β = 0.92) that is consistent across gender, age, and paygrade. However, the relationship between organizational and safety climates and safety issues varied across organizational tiers, suggesting that climate strength may vary across hierarchal levels.

These findings suggest that organizational climate and safety climate become nearly inseparable when personnel must live and work within the same environment, although climate strength may represent a separate issue when examining impact on actual safety outcomes.

Practical applications are discussed, including increased monitoring of organizational climate when assessing safety behaviors in high-risk and highly enmeshed work environments.