SAFETY CLIMATE AGREEMENT FOR A SAFER WORK ENVIRONMENT: A MULTILEVEL MEDIATION ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LMX AND SAFETY BEHAVIORS

Research demonstrated that leadership affects safety outcomes and is a proximal antecedent of safety climate. This work aims to show through an example the importance to use a multilevel mediational analysis to test a model in which the nature of some constructs is multilevel. In particular it is evaluated the effect that leader-member exchange (LMX) has on the supervisor’s and coworkers’ safety climate agreement, which in turn predict safety behaviors, would be different if we chose to ignore the nested structure of data. Furthermore, an example of how to use latent congruence model to operationalize agreement with a mediating role is given. Using a sample of 508 blue-collars and their supervisors, we estimated the conceptual model using a multilevel perspective. Our results confirmed that the relationship between LMX and safety behaviors is mediated by the supervisor’s and colleagues’ safety climate agree-ment. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.