Safety Climate and its Relationship with Furniture Companies’ Safety Performance

Safety climate has been stated as a relevant measure to monitor safety performance. However, it is important to demonstrate that the measures used by companies are appropriate for this purpose. In this context, the current study aims to analyze the relationship between safety climate level and the companies’ safety performance in the Portuguese furniture sector. A total of 14 Portuguese furniture companies were studied. The assessment of the safety climate, considering a multilevel structure, was performed by the use of the Safety Climate in Wood Industries (SCWI) tool. The companies’ safety performance was analyzed trough the application of a checklist. The analysis of the results showed a strong linear positive relation between safety climate scores and the percentage of safety performance. A further analysis was carried out to investigate the relationships between each analyzed scale with the work group’ safety performance. The organizational scale was identified as the most correlated with that variable. In general, the study showed that safety climate, particularly the SCWI tool, is a good measure to analyze and to monitor the furniture companies’ safety performance, identifying the most problematic work groups and showing that as higher the safety climate scores, higher safety behaviors and workplace with better safety conditions are expected.