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