Safety Climate and Safety Voices: Exploring the Moderating Role of Role-Breadth Self- Efficacy

Promoting safety in organizations is arguably the primary goal for both academics and practitioners. Safety voice (i.e., employees’ willingness and ability to speak up about safety matters) has long been investigated as a unidimensional construct, but recently Bazzoli and colleagues (Bazzoli & Curcuruto, 2020; Bazzoli et al., 2020) suggested that a multidimensional model might be more appropriate and advanced several types: promotive voice (i.e., making suggestions to improve safety management), preventive voice (i.e., identifying potential hazards not due to human factors), prescriptive voice (i.e., reporting colleagues that willingly act unsafely). In this poster, we examine the role of personal and contextual variables in predicting safety voices, as well as their interaction. Following Brondino et al.’s (2012) safety climate model, we hypothesized that supervisor’s safety climate (which has more to do with the shift supervisor’s ability to promote safety) would be positively related to safety voices (main effect). Indeed, previous literature (see e.g., Zohar, 2002) showed that supervisor-level safety climate predicted safety behaviors. However, we maintain that these relationships might be contingent upon the levels of role breadth self-efficacy. This construct is defined as an employee’s confidence in their ability to take on broader and more proactive work roles beyond what is prescribed by their work contract. Therefore, the effect of safety climate on extra-role safety behaviors might be a function of employees’ confidence in their ability to carry out such behaviors, such that environmental cues could be more relevant for employees if they believe they are able to follow through with that target behavior (Den Hartog & Belschak, 2012). We then hypothesize that the relationship between safety climate and safety voices would be stronger for employees higher in role-breadth self-efficacy. We tested these hypotheses on a dataset of 118 Italian workers employed by a company operating in the heavy steel industry. Interestingly, only male workers (mean age = 42, SD = 11) participated. Most of them were employed on a permanent contract. We measured supervisor’s safety climate using Brondino et al. (2012) 12-item scale, role-breadth self-efficacy using Parker et al. (2006) six-item measure, and safety voices using Bazzoli et al. (2020) scales. Our results showed that the main effects of safety climate on safety voices were statistically significant. Likewise, role-breadth self-efficacy had a significant main effect on safety voices. All three interaction terms were significant and in the hypothesized direction. Our findings have implications for both practitioners and scholars: organizations should take into account both contextual (i.e., related to the supervisor) and personal (i.e., employee’s characteristics) factors when looking for ways to increase employees’ safety voices behaviors. Most importantly, these seem to interact, further underscoring the value of including both in organizational training initiatives. Our findings should be evaluated in light of a few limitations: data were cross-sectional, limiting our ability of inferring causal relationships, and our sample might not be generalizable to the larger working population.