Advancing safety in turbulent times: Development and validation of a pandemic safety climate scale

Abstract

This study introduces the concept of pandemic safety climate (SC), employees' perceptions of an organization's policies, procedures and practices aiming to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the theory of planned behaviour, we expected that the pandemic SC would be the base of employees' subjective norms, attitudes and perceived control in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic-related challenges. We hypothesized that pandemic SC would be associated with a series of attitudinal and behavioural criteria that aim to prevent the spread of COVID-19 as well as promote other health and well-being outcomes. Using both prospective and cross-sectional datasets, we developed and validated a measure of pandemic SC which consisted of two scales. Organization pandemic SC refers to the employees' perceptions of the strategies and efforts at the organization level and consists of four dimensions: management commitment and proactivity, workplace flexibility and capacity, equipment and sanitization for COVID-19 prevention and COVID-19-related communication and training programmes. Group pandemic SC refers to the employees' perceptions of the intermediate support and care from supervisors and consists of three dimensions: supervisor commitment and proactivity, safety monitoring and COVID-19-related supervisory communication. Construct validity and criterion-related validity were supported. Theoretical and practical implications of the newly developed pandemic SC scales are discussed.