Impact of Safety Climate on Types of Safety Motivation and Performance: Multigroup Invariance Analysis

Abstract

Safety climate has a significant impact on safety motivation. Most prior studies focused on how motivated employees are in a unidimensional safety motivation scale, but they have overlooked why employees are motivated to work safely. The self-determination theory (SDT) is adopted in the present study to investigate how safety climate factors can predict different types of motivation (i.e., intrinsic, identified, introjected, external), consequently, affecting safety performance. There were a total of 392 respondents from questionnaire surveys that were undertaken in both the Chinese and Malaysian construction industries. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA) and path analysis were performed and achieved an invariance model fit across samples. Safety competence and supportive environment were identified as the most important factors that predict intrinsic and identified motivation in the Chinese sample. On the other hand, safety commitment and safety communication were identified to predict intrinsic motivation in the Malaysian sample. In the Malaysian sample, intrinsic motivation predicted not only safety participation but also safety compliance. This was explained by their “self-leadership,” which exerted responsibility and autonomy to the employee’s own safety. The present study contributes to the body of knowledge by revealing the interplay mechanism of different types of safety motivation (multidimensional) in the relationship between safety climate and safety performance. The application of MGCFA and path analysis advances the existing literature by enabling the identification of safety climate factors that can predict types of safety motivation and safety performance. Moreover, the comparison of results between two countries extends the body of research on safety motivation with a cross-cultural perspective. These findings provide practitioners with a guideline to make a more precise assessment of employees’ types of motivation based on which measures can be taken to improve safety management and safety performance, either in domestic or multicultural work teams.