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SAFETY SILENCE:
THE CONCEPTUALIZATION AND
MEASUREMENT OF A NEW
CONSTRUCT
Archana Manapragada & Valentina Bruk-Lee
This research project was supported by a NIOSH pilot grant from the Sunshine Education and Research Center at the University of South Florida
SAFETY-RELATED COMMUNICATION IN THE WORKPLACE
• Important for creating and maintaining a safe work environment
• Upward communication about safety issues allows organizations to detect, correct, and prevent unsafe practices or detrimental safety outcomes
• Constructs that capture safety-related communication:
• Safety communication
• Accident/Incident reporting
• Near-miss reporting
SAFETY SILENCE MOTIVES
• Safety silence – the act of not speaking about safety issues witnessed in the workplace
• Safety silence motives capture various reasons that employees may not speak up about workplace safety issues
OVERVIEW
Study 1:
Qualitative Study
Study 2:
Scale Development
and Refinement
Study 3:
Validation Study
WHY DIDN’T YOU SPEAK UP?
• “[My coworkers] may feel like I’m just reporting everything.”
• “I felt upper management would brush me aside.”
• “I didn’t feel like it was life-threatening.”
• “[I was] just in a hurry. No time to go through the chain of command.”
SAFETY SILENCE MOTIVES
• Relationship-based safety silence - not speaking up about safety issues because of how it may affect relationships within the workplace
• Climate-based safety silence - staying silent in relation to safety issues based on the organizational climate (i.e., organizational norms, managerial actions and support, communication channels within the organization, etc.).
• Issue-based safety silence - the result of an evaluation of the actual event (i.e., severity of the issue, the outcome, how many people it affects, etc.).
• Job-based safety silence - staying silent in relation to safety issues because of one’s job (i.e., job design, job characteristics, job duties, etc.).
PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
• Can be used to detect some of the barriers in fostering a work environment that promotes the communication of safety issues
• Can be used to develop more targeted safety interventions
• Climate-based silence: Changes at the supervisor or organizational level
• Job-based safety silence: Organizations can focus on how jobs are being designed
• Relationship-based safety silence: Implementation of an anonymous reporting processes
• Issue-based safety silence: Well-organized procedures or policies for reporting safety issues
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