Development and validation of a new safety climate scale for petrochemical industries

BACKGROUND: While a considerable body of research has studied safety climate and its role as a leading indicator of organizational safety, much of this work has been conducted with Western manufacturing samples. OBJECTIVE: The current study puts emphasis on the cross-validation of a safety climate model in the non-Western industrial context of Iranian petrochemical industries. METHODS: The current study was performed in one petrochemical company in Iran. The scale was developed through conducting a literature review followed by a qualitative study with expert participation. After performing a screening process, the initial number of items on the scale was reduced to 68. RESULTS: Ten dimensions (including management commitment, workers' empowerment, communication, blame culture, safety training, job satisfaction, interpersonal relationship, supervision, continuous improvement, and reward system) together with 37 items were extracted from the exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to measure safety climate. Acceptable ranges of internal consistency statistics for the sub-scales were observed. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) confirmed the construct validity of the developed safety climate scale for the petrochemical industry workers. The results of reliability showed that the Cronbach's alpha coefficient for the designed scale was 0.94. The ICC was obtained 0.92. CONCLUSION: This study created a valid and reliable scale for measuring safety climate in petrochemical industries.