Disentangling the roles of safety climate and safety culture: Multi-level effects on the relationship between supervisor enforcement and safety compliance

Despite increasing attention to contextual effects on the relationship between supervisor enforcementand employee safety compliance, no study has yet explored the conjoint influence exerted simulta-neously by organizational safety climate and safety culture. The present study seeks to address thisliterature shortcoming. We first begin by briefly discussing the theoretical distinctions between safetyclimate and culture and the rationale for examining these together. Next, using survey data collectedfrom 1342 employees in 32 Italian organizations, we found that employee-level supervisor enforce-ment, organizational-level safety climate, and autocratic, bureaucratic, and technocratic safety culturedimensions all predicted individual-level safety compliance behaviors. However, the cross-level moder-ating effect of safety climate was bounded by certain safety culture dimensions, such that safety climatemoderated the supervisor enforcement-compliance relationship only under the clan-patronage culturedimension. Additionally, the autocratic and bureaucratic culture dimensions attenuated the relation-ship between supervisor enforcement and compliance. Finally, when testing the effects of technocraticsafety culture and cooperative safety culture, neither safety culture nor climate moderated the relation-ship between supervisor enforcement and safety compliance. The results suggest a complex relationshipbetween organizational safety culture and safety climate, indicating that organizations with particularsafety cultures may be more likely to develop more (or less) positive safety climates. Moreover, employeesafety compliance is a function of supervisor safety leadership, as well as the safety climate and safetyculture dimensions prevalent within the organization.