The effect of a safety climate training on safety performance. A longitudinal study on the use of individual protective devises

The aim of this study is to explore the effectiveness on safety performance and particularly on the use of individual protective devises at work of a training concerning safety climate. Safety climate and culture research developed successfully in the last decades, showing how safety climate is a robust predictor of safety subjective outcomes, such as safety behaviour, and of objective outcomes, such as accidents and injuries. Literature shows ambiguous findings on the effectiveness of safety training and interventions to improve safety performance of employees and highlights some methodological criticality. The idea of the present study was to test the effect of a training focused on the improvement of safety climate with a longitudinal design. Data collection involved 1495 blue-collars from 6 Italian manufacturing companies. Two different types of safety climate trainings for supervisors were performed and in some cases no training was performed. A long training was scheduled in 6 weekly meetings of 4 hours each and a short one was scheduled in only one meeting of 3 hours. In 3 companies of the sample safety climate and safety performance were measured twice, one before the training and one about 12 months after it. In all the companies monitoring activities on the use of individual protective devises were conducted. The research evidenced that safety climate training does not always help to reduce the number of unsafe behaviours, but a moderation effect of safety climate seems to inflect the relation between training and performance. Particularly, in work-groups with a high safety climate a positive effect of the training always was found.