Safety climate, safety behaviors, and workplace accidents: What are the mechanisms? A multi-level lagged study

Introduction: Occupational safety is managed by multiple stakeholders at different levels within organizations. Leveraging theory and insights from previous occupational health and safety research, this study formulated and tested hypotheses concerning the interplay between safety climates generated by a team's supervisor and coworkers, workers' individual psychological processes (i.e., safety knowledge and motivation), and their predictive impact on safety-related performance (i.e., safety compliance and participation) as well as workplace accidents measured a year later. Method: By analyzing a 2-wave lagged dataset involving 1,089 Italian workers nested within 143 teams, we test our hypotheses methodologically robustly (i.e., by modeling group-level phenomena at the correct level and controlling for autoregressive effects). Our findings provide somewhat mixed empirical support for our hypotheses and show evidence of individual-and group-level differential relationships. Practical Application: We extensively discuss the relevance of these results, emphasizing the significance of contextual and group-related variables and their multilevel implications for occupational safety management.