The influence of safety culture factors on safety behavior of healthcare professionals in the uae healthcare sector: the moderating role of safety stressors

Abstract

Safety culture is a subset of organizational culture. Organizations clarify their values about the safety and health of their workforce through policies, procedures, and practices, and they are also shown in the norms and values of the organization as a whole. Safety culture is related to the behavior of employees on safety issues. The aim of this study was to determine the influence of safety culture factors (safety climate, safety management practices, safety attitude, safety knowledge and safety motivation) on safety behavior and how this relationship is moderated by safety stressors. The unit of analysis was individual and the study involved healthcare professionals in Abu Dhabi, including physicians, nurses and allied health professionals. In total, 1,000 questionnaires were distributed online and 800 were returned. Only 770 questionnaires were used for further analysis with structural equation modeling. The results suggest that safety culture factors significantly influenced safety behavior. However, no moderating role was found for safety stressors. The multi-sample analysis using invariant measurement confirmed that higher and lower levels of safety stressors did not affect the relations between safety culture factors and safety behavior of healthcare professionals in the UAE healthcare sector. This result provides some interesting implications for healthcare professionals. The study suggests that safety attitudes may regulate the impact on safety behavior of perceptions of management values about safety, and policies and procedures relating to v safety in multicultural environments. It is likely that healthcare professionals who experience a positive workplace safety climate will develop positive attitudes to safety that encourage safety behavior. The homogeneous characteristics of categories of healthcare professionals in the UAE may also offer a positive coping strategy for stress, and this may have caused the insignificant moderating effect of safety stressors on the relationship between safety climates, safety attitudes, and safety behaviors.