Railway safety climate: a study on organizational development

Abstract

The safety climate of an organization is considered a leading indicator of potential risk for railway organizations. This study adopts the perceptual measurement–individual attribute approach to investigate the safety climate of a railway organization. The railway safety climate attributes are evaluated from the perspective of railway system staff. We identify four safety climate dimensions from exploratory factor analysis, namely safety communication, safety training, safety management and subjectively evaluated safety performance. Analytical results indicate that the safety climate differs at vertical and horizontal organizational levels. This study contributes to the literature by providing empirical evidence of the multilevel safety climate in a railway organization, presents possible causes of the differences under various cultural contexts and differentiates between safety climate scales for diverse workgroups within the railway organization. This information can be used to improve the safety sustainability of railway organizations and to conduct safety supervisions for the government.

Keywords:

• safety climate
• railway organization
• factor analysis
• multilevel safety climate

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of Taiwan, ROC, for financially supporting this research. The author also deeply appreciates Mr Chin-min Hsu and his proficient assistance in data collection and processing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) of Taiwan.