The impact of supervisor's safety profile on worker’s safety performance

Safety climate (SC) has been one of the most frequently studied antecedents of safety performance since nineties. Many studies highlight the importance to analyse safety climate at group level but at group level no studies tried to compare the impact of the agreement degree about safety climate between supervisor and his group on workers' safety performance.Safety climate and safety outcomes were measured on a sample of 868 blue-collars of 11 Italian manufacturing companies. SC was measured at the organizational (OSC) and the group level. Group level SC consisted of two measures, one related to the supervisor (SSC) and one related to the co-workers in the work-group (CSC). The same measures were gathered also on 40 supervisors of each work-group (SSC consisted in a self-evaluation). A cluster analysis was conducted on supervisors, considering their perceptions about OSC, SSC and CSC, and four profiles were identified: the Judge (low OSC and CSC scores, and high SSC scores); the Easy-going (high scores for all the scales); the Pro-management (higher OSC scores, similar but lower SSC scores and low CSC scores); the Realist (similar medium size OSC, SSC and CSC scores). A significant relation was found between supervisor profile and safety outcomes, i.e. safety behaviour (compliance and participation). One-way ANOVA, with profile as the independent variable and behaviours as the dependent variable, showed higher values of safety participation for workers with a Realist supervisor. The lowest safety participation values were found for workers with Easy-going supervisor.