*2.3. Safety Climate and Safety Performance*

Griffin and Neal [54] argued that employees' perceptions of the policies, procedures, and practices relating to safety comprise the safety climate. The safety climate acts as a frame of reference for the behavior and attitudes of individuals and groups of employees, and it is argued that it will also affect their accident involvement. The employees with more favorable safety perceptions (indicating a positive safety climate) are less likely to engage in unsafe acts [55]. Safety performance is defined by Neal et al. [12] as the level of safety compliance and safety participation. Safety compliance means "adhering to safety procedures and carrying out work in a safe manner", and safety participation means "helping co-workers, promoting the safety program within the workplace, demonstrating initiative and putting effort into improving safety in the workplace" (p. 101).

Humans play an important role in the occurrence of workplace accidents, but the safety climate can achieve excellence in prevention [56]. At the individual level, the safety climate is concerned with employees' understanding of safety stimuli such as practices, procedures, and policies in the workplace. The safety climate, in fact, serves as a benchmark for directing and guiding suitable and adaptive safety behavior [57].

Guo et al. [51] believe that if individuals have favorable perceptions of safety, they are less likely to act unsafely on site. As a result, accident rates are likely to decline. As such, a safety climate can cause a profound change in employees' behavior and mentality, leading to true safety implementation, thus enhancing safety performance. Borgheipour et al. [52] found a positive result for a safety climate influencing safety performance. The safety climate inculcates danger-avoiding practices and improves safety performance. The safety climate encourages employees to learn safety practices, thus fostering safety performance.

Jafari et al. [58] worked on the development of the safety climate scale and found 10 dimensions, namely management commitment, workers' empowerment, communication, blame culture, safety training, job satisfaction, an interpersonal relationship, supervision, continuous improvement, and a reward system, to be effective in making the safety climate. Management commitment to safety and safety training make people capable of better safety performance. Eskandari et al. [59] developed a scale for measuring safety performance. They considered three factors for their examination, such as the organizational factors, the environmental factors, and the individual factors. They found organizational factors had the highest contribution toward safety performance. A safe climate is rightly considered an organizational factor that encompasses a common understanding of safety among employees.

A safety climate, that is, the common perceptions and attitudes of the employees about ensuring safety practices in the organization at a given point in time [46], leads to minimizing errors at work. This further leads to efficient working and low waste-age of resources, thus ensuring safety performance in the organization. Clarke [60] stated that the assumption underlying the link between an organizational safety climate and the accident rate is that climate provides guidance on suitable organizational behavior, so that a more positive climate encourages safe behaviors through organizational rewards (e.g., recognition and feedback for making safety suggestions), while a more negative safety climate reinforces unsafe behaviors by removing incentives to improve safety (e.g., prioritizing production over safety), which, in turn, are related to the occurrence of workplace accidents.

The social identity theory posits that positive corporate responsibility perceptions like providing safety training to the stakeholders, i.e., employees, having frequent communication, and so forth, leads to safety performance. The safety ensured in work leads to organizational identification. People tend to work in the organizations characterized by safety [61]. The hypothesis developed is:

#### **Hypothesis 3.** *There is a positive impact of a safety climate on safety performance*.
