title: Staying silent about safety issues: Conceptualizing and measuring safety silence motives.
abstract: Communication between employees and supervisors about safety-related issues is an important component of a safe workplace. When supervisors receive information from employees about safety issues, they may gain otherwise-missed opportunities to correct these issues and/or prevent negative safety outcomes. A series of three studies were conducted to identify various safety silence motives, which describe the reasons that employees do not speak up to supervisors about safety-related issues witnessed in the workplace, and to develop a tool to assess these motives. Results suggest that employees stay silent about safety issues based on perceptions of altering relationships with others (relationship-based), perceptions of the organizational climate (climate-based), the assessment of the safety issue (issue-based), or characteristics of the job (job-based). We developed a 17-item measure to assess these four motives, and initial evidence was found for the construct and incremental validity of the safety silence motives measure in a sample of nurses.
authors.affiliation: Florida International University, United States. Electronic address: amana008@fiu.edu.
authors.forename: Archana
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Manapragada
authors.affiliation: Florida International University, United States.
authors.forename: Valentina
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Bruk-Lee
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D003132:Commerce; D003142:Communication; D060389:Construction Industry; D005260:Female; D017144:Focus Groups; D019981:Health Care Sector; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009042:Motivation; D015279:Organizational Culture; D010465:Perception; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D017751:Safety Management; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D017132:Workplace; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Perceptions of safety climate; Safety communication; Safety performance; Safety silence motives; Workplace safety