A correlational study of safety leadership, safety climate and safety performance in laboratories in universities

An outstanding safety performance is what the safety department in an organization aims to achieve. Yet, different theoretical perspectives or models could provide variant explanations to the causality of achieving an excellent safety performance since the antecedents leading to the performance are pretty complicated. Drawn from social system theory (SST), this study proposed an assumptive relationship among safety leadership, safety climate and safety performance. Adopting the questionnaires of safety leadership scale, safety climate scale and safety performance scale, each with high validity and reliability, the researcher adopted a random sampling by mailing to 754 employees in four universities in central Taiwan. 465 selfadministered questionnaires with the response rate of 61.67% were accomplished. By conducting multiple regression analysis (MRA), the result showed that two paths had significant impact on safety performance. One is safety leadership has significant impact on safety performance through the mediating effect of safety climate and the other is safety leadership has a direct impact on safety performance. Moreover, the former path shows more significant impact than the latter one. Accordingly, the research suggests that organization managers, first of all, perform safety leadership with high quality, through which positive safety climate will be enhanced, and then outstanding safety performance will be achieved.