ELECTRICAL UTILITIES
Exploring Safety Climate and Readiness for Organizational Change in the Implementation of an Ergonomic Intervention

Philip Bigelow, Dov Zohar, Donald Cole, Wendy Lee, Shannon Maracle, Mardon Frazer, Richard Wells, Sue Ferrier, Desre Kramer, Dwayne Van Eerd, Carrie Boyle and Suzan Krepostman

Participatory approaches to ergonomics have been shown to be more effective, yet they have not been widely adopted. This research, within the electrical and utilities industry, involves a collaborative partnership between six firms, the sector’s health and safety authority (the Electrical and Utilities Safety Association), and scientists from the Institute for Work and Heath and the newly established Centre of Research Expertise in Musculoskeletal Disorders. It is known that certain factors act as barriers to firms as they go through the process of introducing a new program into their organization. There is a rich literature in the management field on the concept of an organization’s readiness for organizational change to gain an understanding of the adoption of new technologies and industrial processes. We hypothesize that an organization’s readiness for organizational change can be applied to their process of adopting a participatory ergonomics program. We also expect that safety climate, which is a predictor of safety performance, will be an important contributor to the understanding of the barriers and facilitators to program adoption.

Our adapted theoretical model of readiness for organizational change and safety climate has allowed us to develop a number of sub-constructs that will help us gain an understanding of the facilitators and barriers to the implementation and maintenance of PE programs. As an effective participatory ergonomics intervention requires organizational change, sub-constructs of readiness for organizational change were included in an employee survey that was completed by over 900 employees. Items on safety climate, both at the organizational and work-group levels, were also included in the survey.

This research presents a new framework for understanding the facilitators and barriers to implementing company wide participatory ergonomics programs. We present the results of a factor analysis of items measuring constructs of readiness for organizational change as well as a correlational analysis to examine the relationships of subscales of safety climate and readiness for organizational change. The data were obtained from a cross sectional survey of employees in four of the companies who are currently implementing participatory ergonomics programs. The framework and results from the survey provide insight into this new way of looking at how organizations implement participatory ergonomics programs.

Electrical Utilities short article
Electrical Utilities report