Safety climate in trucking industry and its effects on safety outcomes

We developed a safety climate scale for the trucking industry and confirmed its criterion validity by correlations with safety outcome measures. A questionnaire survey was conducted to elicit safety climate in the trucking industry. A total of 1,028 responses (54 % response rate) were collected from truck drivers working for 49 trucking companies in Japan. Incident records between 2004 and 2008 were obtained from 21 out of the 49 companies that we surveyed safety climate. Following a factor extraction criteria (Horn's parallel analysis), six factors on safety climate were elicited by applying principal component analysis with the Promax rotation, yielding 39 % of cumulative variance. Significant correlations with safety outcome measures were identified for the following safety climate factors: strong awareness of safety management/systems, teamwork, and realistic competence-based view. Safety climate contributes positively to the safety performance in a trucking organisation. Safety climate assessment using the factors developed in this paper is applicable as a proactive approach to risk reduction in the trucking industry.