Effects of Management Support, Team Member Support, and Job Status on Safety Climate and Employee Attitudes

ABSTRACT

This study examined the impact of management and team member support on employee attitudes through the mediating effect of safety climate. Five hundred fifty-six physicians and nurses from a large teaching hospital in the eastern United States completed survey items assessing their perceptions of management support, team member support, and safety climate as well as job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Results indicated that while job satisfaction and commitment were directly affected by perceptions of management and team member support, these relationships were also partially mediated by safety climate. In addition, the results suggested that team member support contributed to the prediction of safety climate over and above the effect of management support alone indicating that multiple sources of support may be important in developing positive safety climates. The hypothesized moderating effect of job status was not significant. Implications of the results and suggestions for future research are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Safety climate
• job satisfaction
• organizational commitment
• management support
• team support

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. To ensure that there was no confounding effect of experience for the physician groups that was discussed on page 11, the conditional process analyses were run with medical staff only as well as with the sample that included residents and interns. The pattern of results for medical staff only was the same as that found when medical staff and residents/interns was combined. The analysis presented here contains the combined sample.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bernadette M. Racicot

Bernadette M. Racicot is an assistant professor of management in the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware. Her research interests include organizational climate, employee attitudes, and cross-cultural diversity. She can be reached at [email protected]

Mary C. Kernan

Mary C. Kernan is an associate professor of management in the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware. Her research interests include employee motivation, work attitudes and dysfunctional behavior in organizations. She can be reached at [email protected]

Edward D. Nicholls

Edward D. Nicholls received his Master’s Degree in Organizational Development and Change from the University of Delaware. He is currently a senior transformation consultant at UnitedHealth Group. He can be reached at [email protected]