Citation

Mosher GA, Keren N, Freeman SA, Hurburgh CR. J. Agric. Saf. Health 2013; 19(2): 125-134.

Affiliation

Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011, USA. gamosher@iastate.edu

Copyright

(Copyright © 2013, American Society of Agricultural Engineers)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

23923732

Abstract

The safety climate of an agricultural workplace may be affected by several things, including the level of trust that workers have in their work group supervisor and organizational management. Safety climate has been used by previous safety researchers as a measure of worker perceptions of the relative importance of safety as compared with other operational goals. Trust has been linked to several positive safety outcomes, particularly in hazardous work environments, but has not been examined relative to safety climate in the perennially hazardous work environment of a commercial grain elevator. In this study, 177 workers at three Midwest grain elevator companies completed online surveys measuring their perceptions of trust and safety at two administrative levels: organizational management and work group supervisors. Positive and significant relationships were noted between trust and safety climate perceptions for organizational managers and for work group supervisors. Results from this research suggest that worker trust in organizational management and work group supervisors has a positive influence on the employees' perceptions of safety climate at the organizational and work group levels in an agricultural workplace.

Language: en