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Organizational Safety Climate and Supervisor Safety Enforcement: Multi-level Explorations of the
Causes of Accident Under-Reporting
Tahira M. Probst
Washington State University Vancouver
Author Note: Completion of this project was supported in part by a research grant from the SHRM
Foundation. However, the interpretations, conclusions and recommendations are those of the author
and do not necessarily represent the views of the SHRM Foundation.
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Abstract
Over 3 million employees are injured each year; yet, research indicates that these may be gross
underestimates of the true prevalence. The purpose of the current project was to empirically test the
hypothesis that organizational safety climate and transactional supervisor safety leadership would
predict not only levels of experienced accidents at work, but also the extent to which these accidents go
unreported by employees. Using hierarchical linear modeling and survey data collected from 1379
employees in 35 organizations, support for both hypotheses was found. Specifically, organizational-level
safety climate and employee-level supervisor safety enforcement behaviors both predicted employee
accident under-reporting. Moreover, there was a cross-level interaction, such that the effect of
supervisor enforcement on under-reporting was attenuated in organizations with a positive safety
climate. These results may benefit HR and safety professionals by pinpointing methods of increasing the
accuracy of accident reporting, reducing actual safety incidents, and reducing the costs to individuals
and organizations that result from under-reporting.
Keywords: accident underreporting; safety climate; supervisor safety leadership; transactional
leadership
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Organizational Safety Climate and Supervisor Safety Enforcement: Multi-level Explorations of the
Causes of Accident Under-Reporting
Each year, more than 3 million U.S. workers are injured on the job – several thousand die
(Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011). This figure represents a rate of approximately 3.5 cases for every 100
full-time equivalent workers. Despite this staggering number of illnesses and injuries, a growing body of
research (Leigh, Marcin, & Miller, 2004; Lowery et al., 1998; Probst, Brubaker, & Barsotti, 2008; Probst &
Estrada, 2010; Rosenman et al., 2006) suggests that these figures may actually significantly
underestimate the true number of non-fatal occupational injuries due to employee under-reporting of
workplace injuries and illnesses (i.e., failing to notify appropriate company officials when a safety
incident has occurred). Indeed, such research indicates that between 60-80% of all experienced injuries
are not captured in these national databases (Leigh, et al., 2004; Lowery et al., 1998; Probst, et al., 2008;
Probst & Estrada, 2010; Rosenman et al., 2006).
While some research has linked accident under-reporting with factors such as age and tenure
(Karr, 2000; Conway & Svenson, 1998; Weddle, 1996); fear of reprisals or loss of benefits (Webb, et al.,
1989; Sinclair & Tetrick, 2004); and with a general acceptance that injuries are a fact of life in certain
lines of work (Pransky et al., 1999), little research to date has investigated the effect of organizational
safety climate on the accuracy of employee reports of experienced workplace injuries. Further, there is
limited research examining how leadership behaviors such as supervisor enforcement of safety practices
influence employee reporting behaviors. As a result, there is limited actionable knowledge that can be
applied from previous research to develop effective HR practices to reduce under-reporting.
The current study begins to address these limitations by examining predictors of accident underreporting in a variety of industry sectors. Specifically, this project investigated:
1) the extent of under-reporting of accidents and illnesses in a variety of industry samples;
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2) how organizational safety climate is related to both the number of experienced accidents and
the under-reporting of these accidents;
3) how perceptions of supervisor enforcement of safety policies affect under-reporting; and
4) cross-level interactions between organizational safety climate and supervisor enforcement
behaviors.
In developing specific hypotheses below, a review of the relevant literature is provided to contextualize
the present study.
Accident Under-Reporting & Organizational Safety Climate
Although the exact extent of the phenomenon varies, accident under-reporting has been well
documented in the empirical literature (Glazner et al., 1998; Leigh et al., 2004; Pransky et al., 1999;
Rosenman et al., 2006). For example, Rosenman and colleagues (2006) suggest that up to 68% of all
workplace accidents and injuries are not captured in national injury surveillance systems set up by the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Similarly, Probst, Brubaker, and Barsotti (2008) report that nearly 78% of all experienced accidents
within a sample of 38 companies in the construction industry went unreported. Finally, Probst (2006)
and Probst and Estrada (2010) found that employees failed to report between 50-70% of all experienced
accidents to their supervisors. Thus, although exact estimates vary from study to study, the accumulated
evidence suggests that under-reporting is a prevalent phenomenon. Accordingly, it is predicted that:
Hypothesis 1: The number of accidents reported by employees to their organization will be
fewer than the actual number of accidents experienced (i.e., under-reporting will occur).
Research examining why employees fail to report on-the-job injuries to their employers suggests
that under-reporting may be influenced by demographic and attitudinal characteristics such as age
(Karr, 2000; Conway & Svenson, 1998; Weddle, 1996); organizational tenure (Weddle, 1996); fear of
reprisals or loss of workplace perks and pay incentives (Webb, Redman, Wilkinson, & Sanson-Fisher,
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1989; Pransky et al., 1999; Sinclair & Tetrick, 2004); fear of job loss (Probst, 2006); and individual beliefs
regarding accident and injuries as an occupational hazard (Pransky et al., 1999).
Other research has implicated the importance of organizational safety climate in predicting
accident and illness reporting (Bridges, 2000; Clarke, 1998; Glendon, 1991). Zohar (1980) first defined
organizational safety climate as “a unified set of cognitions [held by workers] regarding the safety
aspects of their organization” (p. 101). Research has shown that there are a number of dimensions that
are important to consider when conceptualizing and measuring safety climate including management
values (i.e., the extent to which management places a high priority on safety), safety communication
(i.e., the extent to which there is an open exchange of information regarding safety), safety training (i.e.,
the extent to which training is accessible, relevant, and comprehensive), and safety systems (i.e., the
extent to which safety procedures are perceived to be effective in preventing accidents; Neal, Griffin, &
Hart, 2000). A significant body of research has shown that these factors are predictive of safety-related
outcomes at work such as accidents and injuries, safety compliance, safety motivation, and safety
knowledge (Brown & Holmes, 1986; Dedobbeleer & Beland, 1991; Hofmann & Stetzer, 1996; Neal,
Griffin, & Hart, 2000; Probst, 2004). Accordingly, it is expected that:
Hypothesis 2: Organizational safety climate will be related to the number of experienced
employee accidents, such that more positive perceptions of the safety climate will be related to fewer
employee accidents.
More importantly, in the current study, it is proposed that organizational safety climate will also
be predictive of employee under-reporting of workplace injuries and accidents. There are several
reasons that support this proposition. First, if employees lack safety training or if safety communication
is poor, then they may not know what constitutes a reportable incident or how to correctly report it to
the organization. Further, if management is perceived as devaluing safety, employees may (correctly or
not) assume that their company doesn’t want to hear or know about injuries when they occur.
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Additionally, punitive safety systems may serve to encourage under-reporting by making rewards and
punishments contingent upon safety outcomes rather than safety behaviors.
Preliminary research suggests that organizational safety climate may influence under-reporting.
Clarke (1998) found that the largest predictor of under-reporting by train drivers was perceived
managerial reactions to such reports. Drivers who thought that managers would be unresponsive or
unconcerned about safety incidents were less likely to report accidents when these occurred. Bridges
(2000) found that near misses are under-reported when employees perceive low levels of management
commitment to safety. Thus, if no incident investigation or corrective actions can be expected to occur
as a result of a reported accident, employees may feel it is pointless to report the incident.
Furthermore, Glendon (1991) suggests that onerous reporting procedures may have a dampening effect
on reporting because employees may decide that it is not worth the effort to report an incident. In a
more systematic investigation of the reasons for underreporting, Probst and Estrada (2010) found that
the most frequently endorsed reasons employees gave for not reporting workplace accidents pointed to
a poor safety climate (e.g., thinking nothing would be done to fix the problem, that the accident was
unimportant, or that there would be negative consequences for reporting). Based on this empirical
evidence, it appears that safety climate may play a role in explaining why individuals choose not to
report incidents to their supervisors. Thus, it is predicted that:
Hypothesis 3: Individuals in organizations with a poor safety climate will engage in more
accident under-reporting than employees in organizations with more positive safety climates.
Accident Under-Reporting & Supervisor Leadership Behaviors
Zohar (2003) discussed the importance of distinguishing between formal and enacted
organizational safety policies. Formal organizational safety policies include the strategic policy making
and development of organizational safety procedures by upper management, whereas enacted policy
refers to the actual implementation and execution of safety procedures and practices among employees
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and their supervisors. Zohar argues that enacted policies carry greater weight than their formalized
counterparts because they more accurately inform expected behavior-outcome contingencies. In other
words, actions speak louder than words when determining safety’s prominence within an organization.
Recent research has largely focused on two different types of supervisor safety leadership:
transformational safety leadership (e.g., Barling, Loughlin, & Kelloway, 2002; Conchie & Donald, 2009;
Kelloway, Mullen, & Francis, 2006; Zohar & Luria, 2004) and, to a lesser extent, transactional safety
leadership (e.g., Zohar, 2002). Whereas transformational safety leadership is concerned with idealized
influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration (Bass &
Avolio, 1995), transactional leadership involves an exchange between the leader and his or her
subordinates, whereby the leader provides resources and rewards in exchange for motivation, goal, or
task accomplishments (i.e., positively reinforcing appropriate behaviors and disciplining inappropriate
behaviors). A growing body of studies and subsequent meta-analyses of that literature (e.g., Christian,
Bradley, Wallace, & Burke, 2009; Nahrgang, Morgeson, & Hofmann, 2011) have shown that safety
leadership is related to both employee safety compliance and safety participation.
Interestingly, however, in a more recent meta-analysis of 37 independent samples (N = 24,363),
Clarke (2013) theorized and found support for the contention that transactional safety leadership would
be more predictive of safety compliance, whereas transformational leadership would be more predictive
of safety participation (e.g., safety citizenship behaviors [OCBs]). Although very few studies have
specifically examined reporting behaviors as dependent safety variables (see Probst, Brubaker, &
Barsotti, 2008 and Probst & Estrada, 2010 for exceptions), this behavior can be more appropriately
considered a compliance behavior rather than an OCB given that accident reporting is typically
mandatory in organizations and not considered a discretionary behavior.
In keeping with this idea, Probst and Brubaker (2001) proposed that extrinsic safety motivation
(a transactional form of safety leadership) would be related to employee accidents and injuries at work.
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Extrinsic safety motivation involves the perceptions of supervisor enforcement of safety policies,
including the extent to which supervisors provide praise for safety compliance and punish for noncompliance. In their study, employees who had supervisors who failed to enforce safety policies had
lower levels of safety compliance and were more likely to experience injuries and accidents at work.
Based on those findings, it is hypothesized that:
Hypothesis 4: Employees who perceive low supervisor enforcement of safety policies will
experience more accidents at work.
Although Probst and Brubaker (2001) did not distinguish between reported and unreported
accidents in their study, there are theoretical reasons to expect that employees whose supervisors are
lax in enforcing safety policies may themselves be more likely to be lax in reporting injuries to their
supervisors. Active transactional leaders closely monitor the behaviors of their subordinates and take
proactive steps to guide appropriate employee behavior (Griffin & Talati, 2011). Because accident
reporting is a compliance-driven behavior (i.e., employees are expected to promptly and accurately
report any injuries experienced at work), supervisors who are higher in transactional safety leadership
(and therefore, place greater focus on proactive error management) can be expected to provide their
employees with greater extrinsic motivation for engaging in these appropriate reporting behaviors.
Indeed, Probst and Estrada (2010) found empirical support for this relationship. Therefore, it is
hypothesized that:
Hypothesis 5: Employees who perceive low supervisor enforcement of safety policies will engage
in greater under-reporting than employees who perceive stronger supervisor enforcement of safety
policies.
Finally, returning to Zohar’s (2003) notion of formal vs. enacted safety policies, the influence of
one’s supervisor can be seen as more “proximal” than the higher-level organizational safety climate.
Whereas the safety climate may be viewed in light of the formal policies, supervisors serve as the
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“interface” between the organizational-level safety climate and the employee’s experience of how those
policies are enacted on a day-to-day basis. In the absence of a positive safety climate, the role of the
supervisor safety enforcement is expected to be even greater than in organizations with a positive
safety climate. In other words, the deleterious effects of having a “lax” supervisor are expected to be
magnified in the organizational context of a poor safety climate. On the other hand, the effects of a
“lax” supervisor would be attenuated in the context of a positive safety climate.
Empirical evidence seems to support this reasoning. Although conducted entirely at the
individual-level, the Probst and Estrada (2010) study found that the relationship between supervisor
safety enforcement and accident underreporting was attenuated among employees who had positive
perceptions of the safety climate (also referred to as psychological safety climate; Clarke, 2009). The
current study represents a significant methodological improvement on their study, however, as it
conceptualizes and measures safety climate at the appropriate level of analysis (i.e., at the
organizational level).
Therefore, based on the theoretical reasoning outlined above and (albeit limited) empirical
evidence, it is expected that:
Hypothesis 6: The relationship between supervisor safety enforcement and accident underreporting will
be exacerbated (i.e., stronger) when the organizational safety climate is poor.
Method
Samples and Participants
Data for this study were drawn from archival studies of organizational safety climate, supervisor
enforcement, and accident reporting behaviors conducted over the past decade by the author in 35
different organizations representing 1379 employees in total (mean organizational sample size = 39.40
employees; SD = 76.44).1 Together, these organizations represent a wide range of industry sectors
where safety is a paramount concern, including manufacturing, construction, transportation, mining,
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pulp and paper processing, health care, food processing, and distribution. The average industry
recordable rate (i.e., the average number of employee injuries per year per 100 full-time employees) of
participating organizations was 5.33 (ranging from 2.0 to 12.7), which is higher than the national
average across all industries (3.50). All data were collected during working hours and employees were
provided informed consent regarding the voluntary and confidential nature of their research
participation.
Sixty-eight percent of respondents were male, 28% female, with 4% not responding. This
corresponds with population analyses of gender distribution that find greater proportions of males in
these industries (Cartwright, Edwards, and Wang, 2011). The median age category of participants was
40-44 yrs. The average employee tenure within their organization was 5.68 years (SD = 6.27).
Study Measures
Safety climate was measured using Neal, Griffin, and Hart’s (2000) 16-item scale designed to
assess four dimensions of safety climate including management values (e.g., “Management places a
strong emphasis on workplace health and safety”), safety communication (e.g., There is open
communication about safety issues within this workplace), safety training (e.g., Safety issues are given a
high priority in training programs), and safety systems (e.g., There are systematic procedures in place for
preventing breakdowns in workplace safety). Items were presented in Likert-type format with a scale
ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (7).
Individual-level responses can be aggregated to the organizational level by taking the mean of
the individual employees’ climate scores within each organization. Before doing this, however, it is
necessary to ensure that individual-level climate perceptions are indeed shared by others in the
organization. Using an Excel tool developed by Biemann, Cole and Voelpel (2012), we computed withingroup agreement, rwg, assuming a uniform distribution (James, Demaree, & Wolf, 1993). Organizational
rwg estimates ranged from .27 to 1.00 with an average rwg of .80. Overall, based on these results, we
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determined that there were acceptable levels of within-group agreement among the companies,
although the level of consensus (or climate strength) varied across the organizations. After aggregating
employee responses to the climate items to form a single safety climate index for each organization, the
mean safety climate across participating organizations was 5.50 (SD=.81) with a range from 2.63 to 6.74.
Supervisor enforcement of safety policies was assessed with the extrinsic safety motivation scale
developed by Probst & Brubaker (2001). This 5-item scale assesses the degree to which employees are
extrinsically motivated to comply with safety rules and policies based on their direct supervisor’s
behaviors (e.g., “My supervisor strictly enforces safety rules and regulations”; “My supervisor praises me
when he or she sees that I am following proper safety procedures”). Items were presented in Likerttype format with a scale ranging from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (7).
Accident under-reporting was evaluated using a recall method to capture experienced and
reported incidents. Specifically, respondents were asked to indicate how many accidents, lost-time
injuries, and first-aid injuries they experienced over the previous 12 months. (Definitions were provided
for all terms to ensure consistent interpretation of the items.) Additionally, they were asked to indicate
for each category how many were reported vs. not reported to appropriate company officials during
that timeframe. Under-reporting was then calculated by comparing the total number of unreported
incidents to the total number of experienced incidents (i.e., the proportion of accidents that went
unreported). Because many employees had no experienced accidents (and therefore, would have a zero
in the denominator, which is mathematically problematic), a constant of .00001 was added to
individuals’ total experienced incidents in order to be able to include their data in the analyses. (Note: It
was important to retain those individuals, because not only were we interested in how safety climate
and supervisor behaviors relate to under-reporting, but we were also interested in how those variables
relate to the overall experience of safety incidents.)
Results
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Means, standard deviations, and zero-order correlations are displayed in Table 1 for both the
individual- and organizational-level data. As can be seen, perceptions of the organizational safety
climate were negatively related to both experienced (r = –.17, p < .01) and unreported (r = –.19, p < .01)
accidents at the individual-level. Additionally, as expected, greater supervisor enforcement was also
related to fewer experienced (r = –.08, p < .01) and unreported (r = –.07, p < .05) accidents. At the
organizational-level, the number of unreported accidents was negatively correlated with safety climate
(r = –.68, p < .01) and supervisor enforcement (r = –.75, p < .01). Finally, at both the individual- and
organizational-levels, a greater number of experienced accidents was positively correlated with more
unreported accidents (r = .62, p < .01; r = .48, p < .05, respectively).
In order to initially determine whether underreporting was occurring, we conducted a repeated
measures analysis comparing the number of experienced accidents to the number reported. If no
underreporting occurs, these two variables should have the same values (i.e., all experienced accidents
are also reported accidents). However, as predicted, there was a significant within-subject effect, F(1,
1193) = 15.45, p < .001, such that the mean number of reported accidents (1.47) was significantly lower
than the number of experienced accidents (3.43). Thus, the next step was to determine whether
supervisor enforcement and organizational safety climate predict this underreporting.
As our data represents two levels (Level 1 - individuals; Level 2 - organizations), we chose
hierarchical linear modeling to analyze the data (Raudenbush & Bryk, 2002). Supervisor enforcement
was centered at the group mean, whereas organizational safety climate was centered at the grand
mean; parameters were estimated using restricted maximum likelihood estimation with robust standard
errors.
As a first step, it was important to determine whether between-group differences accounted for
a significant proportion of the overall variance in underreporting(i.e., ICC1; Bliese, 2000; LeBreton &
Senter, 2008). The test of the null model, t(34) = 6.15, p < .001, indicated that organizational differences
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accounted for 4.7% of the total variance in the proportion of accidents that went unreported, suggesting
sufficient variance between organizations to continue testing our hypotheses. Next, we compared a set
of three additional nested models, starting with Model 1 that included individual-level supervisor
enforcement. Model 2 added organizational-level safety climate. Finally, Model 3 included the crosslevel supervisor enforcement  safety climate interaction term.
As can be seen in Table 2, greater supervisor enforcement was related to significantly less
underreporting, t(34) = -6.24, p < .001. Further, employees in organizations with more positive safety
climates engaged in marginally less underreporting, t(34) = -2.99, p < .001. Finally, as predicted, the
Level-1 relationship between supervisor enforcement and underreporting was attenuated by the
organization’s safety climate, t(34) = 3.47, p < .001, with the cross-level interaction explaining 54.76% of
the variance in the slopes of the enforcement-underreporting relationship (see Figure 1).
Discussion
What goes unreported goes unfixed; thus, there are significant consequences of accident underreporting. Organizations with high levels of accident under-reporting do not have fewer accidents; they
just have fewer reports of accidents. While the appearance of fewer accidents may have short-term
benefits (e.g., a lower workers’ compensation loss rate), these organizations are likely to pay a heavy
price when it comes to the long-term health and safety of their employees and the costs associated with
the failure to rectify the root causes of the injuries or accidents (Pransky et al., 1999).
The results of the current research suggest that safety climate and supervisor enforcement
behaviors are both important to determining not only whether employees experience accidents at work,
but also whether employees are comfortable bringing safety concerns and incidents to the attention of
their supervisor in order to address the root causes of the problem. By demonstrating the link between
supervisory behaviors and under-reporting, the current study provides yet another piece of evidence
highlighting the importance of developing good leader-employee relations where employees trust their
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supervisors and feel comfortable reporting unsafe conditions or safety incidents without fear of
repercussions. Moreover, they speak to the importance of supervisors providing regular feedback (both
positive and negative) in response to observed employee safety behaviors.
The current results are particularly interesting, however, because they suggest that importance
of the supervisor’s safety enforcement may vary depending on the context of the broader organization’s
safety climate. Specifically, in the current dataset, in organizations with poor safety climates, greater
supervisor enforcement appears to be related to reduced employee underreporting. However, in
organizations with positive safety climates, employee underreporting was low regardless of the
individual-level of supervisor enforcement.
Implications for Practice
From a practical perspective, this suggests that organization-wide efforts to improve the overall
safety climate may be more effective than targeting the enforcement behaviors of individual-level
supervisors. On the other hand, if the organization’s safety climate is not a positive one, then the extent
to which employees accurately report accidents is largely dependent on the enforcement behaviors of
their individual supervisors.
By identifying specific variables related to such underreporting such as safety climate and
supervisor enforcement behaviors, organizations have more tools that will not only improve accurate
reporting of safety incidents, but can also improve overall safety. These results may benefit human
resources and safety professionals within organizations by pinpointing methods of increasing the
accuracy of accident reporting, reducing actual safety incidents, and reducing the costs to individuals
and organizations that result from under-reporting. For example, the current results suggest the
importance of designing more effective safety incentive systems. Many safety incentive programs used
in organizations provide rewards to individuals or work groups for being “accident-free”. Yet, research
suggests that this does not reduce accidents, but rather drives them underground. A better
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understanding of the relationship between safety climate, supervisor enforcement, and accident
underreporting potentially allows for more effective design of workplace safety reward programs that
actually lead to improved safety outcomes rather than merely fewer reported accidents. Simply having
a supervisor who praised employees for safe behavior and punished for unsafe behavior was related to
fewer accidents and lower levels of underreporting.
The data also help organizations to better understand the link between safety climate and
accident under-reporting. A focus on safety is more than just “lip service” with an important distinction
between espoused and enacted safety climate (Zohar, 2003). Safety needs to be recognized and
rewarded at all levels of the organization, not just at the employee-level. Additionally, safety does not
only fall within the domain of the “safety manager” or the “safety committee.” It is a strategic HR focus
with bottom-line implications. HR professionals know the high direct and indirect costs associated with
workplace injuries and plenty of empirical evidence exists to support the relationship between
organizational safety climate and injury outcomes (e.g., Christian, Bradley, Wallace, & Burke, 2009;
Clarke, 2006). However, the current results also point to the importance of safety climate in predicting
the extent to which safety incidents go unreported. Organizations that conduct a self-assessment of
their safety climate can use this knowledge to predict the extent to which they may have significant
levels of accident underreporting occurring.
The current results also have implications for the organizational development of more effective
organizational leaders. By demonstrating the link between supervisory behaviors and under-reporting,
this provides yet another piece of evidence highlighting the importance of developing good leaderemployee relations where employees trust their supervisors and feel comfortable reporting unsafe
conditions or safety incidents without fear of repercussions. Toward this end, future research should
also examine the relationship between transactional and transformational safety leadership in
promoting accurate accident reporting by employees.
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Finally, it is also hoped that the current results will assist with decreasing the human and
financial costs associated with unsafe behavior, accidents, and injuries. Estimates suggest the costs
associated with workplace injuries top $100 billion in lost wages and productivity, medical costs, and
administrative expenses (National Safety Council, 2006), not including psychological costs to the
employee or damage to an organization’s reputation with potentially adverse impacts on recruitment
and retention (Hofmann, Morgeson, & Gerras, 2003). By reducing employee-level accident
underreporting, organizations can more effectively investigate and address the root causes of employee
accidents and decrease their occurrence and associated costs.
Theoretical and Methodological Implications
From a theoretical and methodological perspective, the current set of results indicates the
important role of context in predicting employee safety reporting behaviors. Theoretically, these results
suggest that despite the closer “proximity” of supervisors to their employees, the otherwise negative
effects of a lax supervisor on employee accident-reporting behaviors can be overcome by a positive
organizational safety climate context. This runs somewhat counter to the notion that supervisors may
carry a greater weight in influencing subordinate behavior than the more distal variable of safety
climate. Although this may be true when considering the main effects of supervisor safety leadership
and organizational safety climate, the current results do appear to indicate that a positive safety climate
can greatly attenuate (although not entire eliminate) the effects of poor supervisor safety leadership on
employee under-reporting behaviors.
Methodologically speaking, this study represents a significant advancement over previous
underreporting research. Specifically, although these results comport with earlier research by Probst
and Estrada (2010) which found similar relationships between employee perceptions of climate,
supervisor safety leadership and underreporting, that study could not distinguish between employeelevel effects and organizational-level contextual effects. Moreover, since all of their data were single-
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source and obtained at the individual-level, it is unclear how much of their demonstrated effects were
due to common method variance. The current results indicated that there was significant variance
across organizations in the relationship between supervisor safety enforcement and underreporting
behaviors. Significantly, nearly 55% of that variation could be explained by the organizational-level
differences in safety climate. Additionally, because organizational safety climate scores were aggregated
across all employee participants in an organization, and were not a function of the individual employee
respondent, the problems of common method variance were reduced.
Limitations and Directions for Future Research
Despite the early promise of these results, there are limitations associated with the current
study in particular and with the study of accident underreporting in general. Accident underreporting
can occur at the organizational-level and at the individual-level. At the organizational-level,
underreporting occurs when an organization’s official Recordable Injury Rate that they report to the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration is an undercount of the true number of work-related
illnesses and injuries that the company is aware of. Objective data drawn from Owner Controlled
Insurance Programs or Workers Compensation claims, for example, can be used to estimate the level of
organizational underreporting. Indeed, Probst et al. (2008) found that this form of underreporting can
also be predicted by an organization’s safety climate.
At the individual-level, however, underreporting is methodologically more challenging to
objectively operationalize. By definition, individual level-underreporting occurs because the individual
does not report an experienced accident to their employer. Thus, there are no organizational records
that can serve as an objective comparison for the experienced accidents. In the current study, both
experienced and reported accident data were derived from employee self-reports regarding their
experiences at work. As such, these are subject to cognitive biases and recall errors due to limitations in
human memory and cognitive processing.
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One methodological improvement to the measurement of reported accidents would have been
to obtain archival data regarding employee reports of accidents and injuries made to their employer.
Although research suggests these can also be imperfect data due to organizational-level underreporting
of their own injury counts, such data would at least provide another complementary source of
information regarding the reported accidents. Unfortunately, such a methodological approach is not
without its own limitations as this would require identified data which could cause complications due to
the sensitivity of the safety data being collected and the severe penalties that some organizations
impose for failure to report workplace accidents.
With respect to the experienced accidents, a promising methodological advance would be to
rely on ecological momentary assessments (EMA) to repeatedly sample employee experiences of workrelated injuries and accidents. Given the low base rate nature of workplace accidents, such data would
be quite time-consuming and expensive to collect since data collection would ideally occur for a
minimum of one year. While it might be challenging to do this in a multi-level context with dozens of
organizations, it could certainly be done within a single organizational context, and would nonetheless,
represent a methodological advancement on the measurement side of accident underreporting.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the current study demonstrated that both organizational safety climate and a
transactional form of supervisor safety leadership – namely, extrinsic safety motivation – were
significantly related to employee underreporting of work-related accidents. Specifically, employees
whose supervisors consistently enforced appropriate safety behaviors and who were employed in
organizations with positive safety climate were less likely to engage in accident underreporting
behaviors. Moreover, organizational variations in the relationship between supervisor enforcement and
employee underreporting could be accounted for by organizational-level safety climate. Specifically, in
organizations with a positive safety climate, the relationship between individual-level supervisor
Running Head: MULTI-LEVEL EXPLORATIONS OF THE CAUSES OF ACCIDENT UNDER-REPORTING
19
enforcement and underreporting was greatly attenuated. These results have practical, theoretical, and
methodological implications for the empirical study and organizational prevention of accident
underreporting.
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20
Footnote
1
Because these data are drawn from archival datasets from previously collected research efforts,
the results from some of these individual data collections were previously published [cites to be
supplied upon ms acceptance]. Notably, the majority did not concern the phenomenon of accident
under-reporting and only one examined the same three primary variables. However, that publication [to
be cited] presented the results of individual-level analyses drawn from a single sample rather than
aggregated data at the organizational-level to conduct the kind of multi-level analyses presented in the
current study.
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21
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Table 1
Means, Standard Deviations, and Zero-Order Correlations
Variable
Mean
SD
Safety
Climate
Supervisor
Enforcement
Experienced
Accidents
Unreported
Accidents
Safety Climate
5.18
1.25
.97
.89**
-.25
-.68**
Supervisor Enforcement
4.62
1.19
.59**
.63
-.23
-.75**
Experienced Accidents
3.43
28.09
-.17**
-.08**
n/a
.48*
Unreported Accidents
1.94
17.11
-.19**
-.08**
.62**
n/a
Note: * p < .05; **p < .01
Correlations above the diagonal are at the organizational-level (N=35), whereas those below the
diagonal are at the individual-level (listwise n=1060). Means and SD are reported at the individual-level;
Cronbach’s alpha is reported along the diagonal.
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Table 2
Multilevel Estimates for Models Predicting Accident Under-reporting
Null Model
Model 1
Model 2
Model 3
.108 (0.018)**
0.108 (0.018)**
0.101 (0.015)**
0.101 (0.015)**
-
-0.055 (0.009)**
-0.060 (0.010)**
-0.049 (0.008)**
-
-
-
-
L-1 (r)
0.08991
0.08555
0.08531
0.08530
L-2 (u0)
0.00439
0.00517
0.00377
0.00391
-
0.00042
0.00042
0.00019
543.889
493.338
494.518
495.826
2
4
4
4
Δ Deviance Statistic
-
50.551
49.371
48.063
Δ df
-
2
2
2
p-value
-
0.000
0.000
0.000
Parameters
Constant
Level 1
Supervisor Enforcement
Level 2
Safety Climate
Cross-Level Interaction
Climate x Supervisor Enforcement
-0.067 (0.022)*
-0.075 (0.024)**
0.028 (0.008)**
Variance Components
Random Coefficient
Model Fit Statistics
Deviance Statistic
Degrees of Freedom
Model Fit Tests
Note: Standard Errors are in parentheses; * p < 0.01 ** p < 0.001
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Data Transparency Appendix
Narrative
For the past 10 years and for the express purpose of conducting the multi-level analyses presented in
the current ms, the author has been including measures of the constructs of interest in all data
collection efforts. However, because these data are drawn from the archival datasets of previous data
collection efforts, the results from some of these individual data collections have been previously
published [cites to be supplied upon ms acceptance]. Notably, the majority did not concern the
phenomenon of accident under-reporting and only one examined the same three primary variables.
However, that publication presented the results of individual-level analyses drawn from a single sample
rather than aggregated data at the organizational-level to conduct the kind of multi-level analyses
presented in the current study. The following table displays where each variable appears in each study,
as well as the current status of each study. Where all cells are blank indicates that although measures of
safety climate, enforcement, and underreporting were included in the employee survey, none of those
variables were reported on in the published manuscript.
Variable
Study
MS 1
(Status = in press)
MS 2
(Status = current ms)
MS 3
(Status = pub)
MS 4
(Status = pub)
MS 4
(Status = pub)
(single sample at individual-level only)
MS 5
(Status = pub)
MS 6
(Status = pub)
MS 7
(Status = pub)
MS 8
(Status = pub)
Safety
Climate
Supervisor
Enforcement
Accident
Underreporting
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
X
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