Sharing Psychological Safety Climate at the Group Level among Construction Workers: The Roles of Group Identification and Interactional Justice

Abstract

As a powerful method for reducing accidents and harm in the construction domain, safety climate has garnered significant attention. However, previous research has focused primarily on top-down effects associated with the multilevel nature of safety climate, thereby overlooking how an upper-level safety climate can be generated. In this study, we shift the focus to how individual psychological safety climate can evolve into shared perceptions among group members (i.e., group safety climate) from a bottom-up perspective. Drawing upon social identity theory, we posit that group identification can transform psychological safety climate into group safety climate and that this process can be strengthened by interactional justice. Data were collected from 371 construction workers across 58 different groups. The hypotheses were tested using hierarchical linear modeling. The results demonstrated that psychological safety climate can be transformed into group safety climate by enhancing workers’ group identification. This research also revealed that interactional justice weakened the degree to which workers’ psychological safety climate contributes to group identification, thereby affecting the emergence of group safety climate. This study enriches our understanding of the relations among safety climates at multiple levels by revealing how and when psychological safety climate can be transformed into group safety climate. This study also provides deeper insights into the process of generating group safety climate by incorporating both its level and its strength. In addition to considering the property of level, the inclusion of the property of strength enriches the extant research on the construction industry. By explaining how a group-level safety climate is generated through an aggregation process involving psychological safety climate, we provide managers with the essential knowledge they need to take advantage of the individual psychological safety climate to establish, nurture, and sustain a positive safety climate within construction groups. Our study focuses on a sample of Chinese construction workers; hence, future research should utilize samples drawn from other geographical regions and cultural backgrounds to examine the robustness and generalizability of the findings of the present study. By elucidating the underlying mechanism of psychological safety climate as a precursor to group safety climate, this study offers suggestions that construction firms can use to improve group safety climate and thereby improve overall safety performance. Consistent with the assumptions underlying the conceptualization of unit-level safety climate, our study indicates that psychological safety climate can serve as a bottom-up vehicle for group safety climate. As such, managers should be encouraged to take various actions, such as adopting transformational leadership styles, to enhance construction workers’ perceptions of safety climate. These efforts aim to establish the conditions necessary for psychological safety climate to emerge at the group level. Furthermore, since group identification acts as a mediator in the link between psychological safety climate and group safety climate, managers should take steps such as improving construction workers’ job satisfaction to strengthen workers’ group identification. Additionally, since psychological safety climate and interactional justice can complement one another, firms should consider interactional justice on-site. Treating workers as equals and in a moral manner during daily interactions may be effective in improving group safety climate.