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Introduction
Occupational accidents and injuries remain a significant problem in UK manufacturing, with 41 fatalities, 6,809 major injuries and 32,550 over three day absences recorded during 2002/03 ([29] Health and Safety Executive, 2004). The sector has demonstrated little improvement in reducing fatalities or major injuries, with the fatal injury rate showing only a slight fall and the major injury rate remaining static over the previous year ([29] Health and Safety Executive, 2004). Thus, safety in the manufacturing sector continues to pose a major problem within the UK.
Recent safety literature has emphasised the organisational nature of industrial accidents ([45] Reason, 1997) and empirical work has focused on the identification of organisational, managerial and environmental factors that influence accident causation ([52] Tomas and Oliver, 1995; [18] Flin et al. , 1996; [6] Cheyne et al. , 1998). Much of this literature has focused on the concept of safety culture (or safety climate), defined as "the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behaviour" that determine the organisation's safety performance ([27] Health and Safety Commission, 1993, p. 23). However, more recently, researchers have begun to look at further organisational factors, including the influence of organisational climate ([40] Neal et al. , 2000), leadership style ([57] Zohar, 2002; [3] Barling et al. , 2002) and occupational stressors ([30] Hemingway and Smith, 1999; [20] Gillen et al. , 2002) on industrial accidents. An understanding of the way in which organisational and environmental factors influence safety performance within UK manufacturing will aid the development of more effective safety interventions to reduce accidents.
Safety climate and safety performance
The earliest empirical study to examine "safety climate" ([55] Zohar, 1980, p. 96) defined it as:
... a summary of molar perceptions that employees share about their work environments ... a frame of reference for guiding appropriate and adaptive task behaviours.
Introduced into the literature following the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the concept of "safety culture" is often used interchangeably with safety climate, in the sense of reflecting workers' attitudes towards safety ([14] Cox and Cox, 1996). Consistent evidence of a significant relationship between a more positive safety climate (or culture) and fewer accidents has been demonstrated in hazardous industries, such as chemical and nuclear processing ([35] Lee