This article examines differences in safety schemas among upper managers, supervisors, and workers. The study used interviews and text analysis software to analyze safety perceptions. The software identified 10 themes in participants' discussions of safety. Upper managers focused on culture and people, supervisors on corporate values, management practices, and safety communication, and workers on procedures and safety training. The results suggest safety schemas differ between groups and this could impact safety efforts if not addressed.

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Automated text analysis to examine qualitative differences in safety schema
among upper managers, supervisors and workers
Sarah K. Colley, Andrew Neal ⇑
School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, QLD 4072, Australia
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 6 April 2011
Received in revised form 16 January 2012
Accepted 7 April 2012
Keywords:
Occupational safety
Safety climate
Schema
Concept mapping
Qualitative analysis
a b s t r a c t
Differences in people’s understanding of the concept of safety within an organization represent a barrier
to communication, and may potentially undermine attempts to improve safety. The current study used a
qualitative research design to examine whether safety schemas differed between individuals with and
without leadership responsibilities. A representative sample of upper managers (N = 6), supervisors
(N = 7) and workers (N = 12) were purposively sampled and interviewed. A machine learning algorithm
was used to automatically extract concepts and themes from the interview transcripts. Results identified
10 emergent safety climate themes that formed the basis of the safety climate schema. Many of these
themes aligned with dimensions of safety climate identified in the academic literature. Results also indi-
cated that safety climate schema of upper managers, supervisors and workers differed. Upper managers
were concerned more with themes relating to ‘culture’ and ‘people’; supervisors were concerned more
with themes relating to ‘corporate values’, ‘management practices’ and ‘safety communication’; and
workers were concerned more with themes relating to ‘procedures’ and ‘safety training’. Results are dis-
cussed in relation to safety climate theory and in terms of how managers can use this knowledge to
improve safety communicate and align safety schemas.
Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
Safety climate is an important predictor of safety behaviors and
incidents (Clarke, 2006; Christian et al., 2009). The term ‘safety cli-
mate’ refers to perceptions of safety related policies, procedures
and practices that signal the concern for safety (Griffin and Neal,
2000). Safety climate reflects the meaning that individuals and
groups attach to the value and importance of safety. James and
James (1989) have proposed that meaning about attributes of the
work environment, like safety, are stored in an individual’s mental
representations or schema. Schemas are used to interpret stimuli
within the work environment and guide behavior (James and
James, 1989; Zohar, 1980). In relation to safety, those who perceive
that the organization values and places a high importance on
safety are more likely to comply with required procedures and
engage in proactive safety behaviors (Neal and Griffin, 2006; Neal
et al., 2000). Organizations and groups in which these perceptions
are shared experience fewer accidents and incidents (Clarke, 2006).
For these reasons, it has been argued that a viable strategy for
managing risks and minimizing incidents is to promote a positive
and unified safety schema across an organization (Farrington-Dar-
by et al., 2005).
Research, however, suggests that people within organizations
often do not share unified beliefs about the value of safety – cli-
mate perceptions tend to differ across groups within an organiza-
tion (Collinson, 1999; Harvey et al., 1999; Health and Safety
Laboratory, 2002; Lee, 1997). To date, the majority of research
examining similarities and differences in safety climate percep-
tions across groups has done so using survey methodology (Findley
et al., 2007; Harvey et al., 1999; McDonald et al., 2000). These stud-
ies have demonstrated that there may be differences in the mean
or the variance of climate dimensions across groups within an
organization. These are referred to as differences in level or
strength of climate. Whilst survey methodologies are useful for
identifying differences in the level or strength of climate percep-
tions, they are less useful for establishing the underlying meaning
that different groups ascribe to safety. As argued below, there are
theoretical grounds for believing that the content of schema can
differ across groups within an organization. From a practical per-
spective, such differences are important, because differences in
understanding and meaning represent a barrier to communication.
Better understanding of safety schema across groups will assist
managers to communicate in a manner – via action and word –
that aligns with the safety schema of workers.
The current study aims to explore whether differences in safety
schema exist between individuals with and without leadership
responsibilities. As explained below, it is difficult to assess the
0925-7535/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2012.04.006
⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +61 7 3300 8630; fax: +61 7 3365 4466.
E-mail address: Andrew@psy.uq.edu.au (A. Neal).
Safety Science 50 (2012) 1775–1785
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
Safety Science
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ssci

3. Author's personal copy
content and structure of schema using existing research methods.
For this reason, we used a new approach. We used semi-structured
interviews to explore participants’ perceptions regarding the value
and importance of safety, and used a data mining tool, known as
Leximancer, to systematically and objectively decode the underly-
ing meaning within the interview scripts. One of the novel features
of Leximancer is the use of a machine learning algorithm to
automatically extract the knowledge structure of textual data by
identifying the concepts contained within the text, and to quantify
the inter-relationships among those concepts. Leximancer, there-
fore, provides a novel method for assessing the structure of safety
climate schema.
1.1. Safety climate: A schema for guiding safety related sense making
According to Taylor and Crocker (1981), a schema is a cognitive
structure that consists of a representation of some defined stimulus
domain (e.g., safety). The schema contains general knowledge
about that domain, including specification of the inter-relation-
ships among its attributes, as well as specific examples or instances
of the stimulus domain. Broadly, schema can be categorized as
event schema (e.g., memories of specific safety interactions with
one’s supervisor or co-workers) or concept schema (e.g., knowledge
about safety procedures; Salwen and Stacks, 1996). Collectively,
these schema function as mental maps that guide (1) the search
for, acquisition of, and processing of information and (2) guide
behavior in response to that information (Neisser, 1976; Weick,
1979b).
Safety climate has been described as a collective schema of
meaning by Cabrera et al. (1997). A safety schema can be described
as a mental structure that contains knowledge about safety-related
attributes (e.g., safe/unsafe, risk/no risk, safety procedures and
practices, supervisor safety expectations) and the relationships be-
tween those attributes (Fiske and Taylor 1984). The first function
of this schema is to guide the search for, acquisition of, and pro-
cessing of safety-specific information. In this function, a persons’
safety schema identifies and categorizes incoming information
and helps answer the question ‘‘what or who’’ is important here
(e.g., ‘‘this is a safety problem,’’ ‘‘this is a formal safety briefing,’’
and ‘‘he/she is working safely’’). The second function of this schema
is to guide behavior in response to safety information. In this
function, a persons’ safety schema assists them to determine the
meaning of the stimulus so an appropriate response can be gener-
ated. This search for meaning phase is largely ego-centric and
includes such appraisals as: ‘‘What safety information is most
important for me to pay attention to here?’’, ‘‘What does this situ-
ation or event mean for my safety?’’, ‘‘What do I expect will happen
next?’’, ‘‘Will my response influence the safety of my co-workers or
supervisor?’’, and ‘‘What would my co-workers and supervisor
expect me to do?’’.
1.2. The content of safety schema
The majority of safety climate research over the last 25-years
has focused on construct conceptualization and measurement (Zo-
har, 2008). Within this body of research there is general agreement
about the definition of safety climate and measurement instru-
ments tend to share a common design approach (Findley et al.,
2006). Across the literature however, researchers tend to empha-
size slightly different factors. Guldenmund (2000) identified the
most commonly used safety climate factors across 15 published
studies. These factors included: management practices and
commitment to safety, risk in the environment, safety systems
and procedures, safety training and competence, and work pres-
sures (Guldenmund, 2000).
More recently, Zohar (2008) has argued that safety climate
should be conceptualized as a multi-level construct. This is because
people at different levels in an organization have different respon-
sibilities and priorities. The responsibility of senior management is
to develop corporate policies regarding safety, and to establish
procedures to facilitate the implementation of that policy. Unit
managers and supervisors are responsible for the implementation
of these policies and procedures, which are translated into prac-
tices. This translation is done in the context of daily interactions
with employees. It requires the supervisor to make choices
regarding how and which procedures to implement, and involves
trade-offs between safety and productivity being made on a
routine basis. Individual employees, in turn, are expected to apply
safety policies, procedures, and practices in the context of their
daily work.
The focus of Zohar’s (2008) work has been on the measurement,
via survey, of employees’ perceptions of safety climate stemming
from the actions of senior managers and supervisors. However,
these arguments can be used as the basis for understanding the dif-
ferences that might emerge in the schema of senior managers,
supervisors and employees. Senior managers are likely to be con-
cerned with safety policy. They are likely to articulate safety as a
strategic priority, espouse a vision for safety, and emphasize corpo-
rate responsibility for the welfare of employees. Supervisors are
likely to be concerned with safety practices, having to deal with
trade-offs between production and safety and communicate these
priorities to employees. Employees are concerned with the issues
that affect them in their daily work. These include the procedures
they have to comply with, the equipment they use, the training
they receive, and the hazards that they are exposed to.
Whilst there are reasonably strong grounds for believing that
the content of safety schema may differ across levels within the
organization, it is difficult to empirically test this proposition.
Questionnaires are not well suited for assessing this question. A
safety climate survey can be used to assess whether senior manag-
ers, supervisors and employees agree on specific attributes, such as
the extent to which management is committed to safety. However,
it is difficult to assess whether the meaning of the concept differs
across these groups. In the sections below, we review existing
methods for assessing the content and structure of schema, and
present the approach that we used in the current study.
1.3. Mapping safety schemas: Methodological issues
Kraiger et al. (1993) described several methodologies for di-
rectly measuring cognitive structures such as schema. A common
technique requires individuals to make judgments about the
similarity or closeness among an a priori set of core attributes or
concepts. Concepts are mapped by individuals who physically
free-sort and arrange concepts in space (e.g., Champagne et al.,
1981). Alternatively, the judgements can be submitted to a cluster-
ing or scaling algorithm (e.g., Cooke and McDonald, 1987), referred
to as structural assessment (Goldsmith and Johnson, 1990). The
resulting map is scored by a variety of techniques including assess-
ing the degree of similarity between the produced map and a pro-
totype map (Goldsmith and Davenport, 1990) or by determining its
level of complexity (e.g., the more levels or the more differentia-
tion among concepts within a level, the more complex the map;
Champagne et al., 1981). This method is effective for identifying
the inter-relationships amongst a set of pre-defined concepts,
however, it does not allow researchers to identify which freely-
recalled concepts are contained within an individual’s schema.
A similar computerized methodology, Pathfinder, creates a gen-
erated link-weighted network of concepts. This is a configuration
in which concepts are represented as nodes and the relationship
between nodes are depicted as links between nodes. A similarity
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4. Author's personal copy
index between each individual’s representation of the relationship
between nodes and the researchers’ a priori map is calculated.
According to Kraiger et al. (1993) this index is approximately equal
to the number of common links between the two networks divided
by the total number of links in both networks (Goldsmith and Dav-
enport, 1990). Pathfinder however, also requires researchers to
generate a complete and accurate set of concepts prior to the
research. If initial concept selection is inaccurate, the resulting
knowledge map is compromized. More generally, all of these tech-
niques rely on participants to make explicit judgements regarding
the similarity among concepts. The problem with this approach is
that similarity ratings are highly context-dependent, and will vary
depending upon how the task is framed.
To overcome these limitations the current study employed Lex-
imancer. Leximancer is an automatic text analytic tool that uses
machine-learning to discover implicit, indirect relationships
between concepts occurring within collections of naturally occur-
ring textual data (Smith and Humphreys, 2006). In this respect,
Leximancer remedies the abovementioned limitations by allowing
the discovery of previously unknown concepts and relationships
that naturally occur within text. Leximancer visually displays the
extracted information in a conceptual knowledge map. This con-
cept map provides an overview of the key concepts extracted from
the text and how they are related (Leximancer, 2009). Conceptu-
ally, the machine-learning process uses a grounded methodology
that is similar to traditional content analysis. Traditional content
analysis can be done as either conceptual (i.e., thematic) analysis
or relational (i.e., semantic) analysis (Martin and Rice, 2007). The
Leximancer machine-learning process utilizes both types of analy-
sis to identify concepts within a body of text and to show how they
relate to one another.
Leximancer employs three main analytic processes (Leximanc-
er, 2009; Martin and Rice, 2007). First, it automatically identifies
the most important concepts being discussed in the document(s),
and reports their frequency of occurrence as an absolute count;
and as a probability relative to the most common concept in the
text (Martin and Rice, 2007). Second, Leximancer provides a mea-
sure of the direct relationships between concepts by measuring
how often concepts co-occur (i.e., occur close together) within
the text. Third, Leximancers’ concept map represents groups of
concepts that cluster together because they are used together in
similar contexts. Concepts that occur together in the text attract
one another strongly when the map is clustered, and so settle
together in theme groups. The themes also capture some of the
indirect relationships between concepts.
Computationally, the Leximancer concept-mapping algorithm is
based on a variant of the spring-force model for the many-body
problem (e.g., Chalmers and Chitson, 1992). The method Leximanc-
er uses simulates forces between the concepts and is a highly dis-
sipative iterative numerical model that comes under the definition
of a complex network system (Smith and Humphreys, 2006). Smith
and Humphreys’s (2006) have evaluated a set of algorithms for
extracting relevant concepts. This validation process has shown
that Leximancer does extract suitable, reproducible, and cross-val-
idated concepts and semantic networks. Leximancer’s ability to
automatically identify and map both the concepts and inter-rela-
tionship between concepts in natural text makes it a useful
approach for identifying safety schema.
1.4. Research setting and approach
This paper describes a study that was conducted in a large, gov-
ernment owned, passenger and freight rail company. Within the
rail industry, safety culture or climate was identified as a potential
risk factor to rail companies after it was found to be a contributing
factor in the 2003 Waterfall train derailment (New South Wales,
Australia). This derailment resulted in the deaths of a train driver
and six passengers, and injured a further 41 passengers
(McInerney, 2005). The participating organization had previously
administered climate surveys, however they were interested in
gaining a deeper understanding of employee safety perceptions.
2. Method
2.1. Participants
Participants worked for an Australian freight and passenger rail
company. A purposive sampling strategy (Silverman, 2001) was
employed over other common sampling strategies (e.g., random
sampling) to ensure our sample contained proportionally repre-
sentative numbers of participants employed across upper manage-
ment, supervisory or worker roles. Purposive sampling also
enabled employees to be selected across all major business-units
within the company to ensure the sample was as representative
of the organization as possible. In total 25 employees were inter-
viewed. Of these six were upper managers, seven were supervisors
and 12 were operational employees (e.g., train drivers, technical
trades persons, control operators). In relation to safety, the role
of upper managers was largely to devise and strategically imple-
ment organizational safety priorities; the role of supervisors was
to liaise with upper managers and workers to implement organiza-
tional safety policy; while the role of workers was largely to man-
age risks and hazards on a daily basis. All participants were male
and the mean age for the group was 45.2 years (Range = 21–55;
SD = 7.48). On average participants had been working for the com-
pany for 21.8 years (Range = 2–39; SD = 8.6).
2.2. Interview instrument
A semi-structured interview schedule was developed following
McCracken’s (1988) interview guidelines. Interview questions
were designed to be unobtrusive to enable participants to tell their
own story, on their own terms. To facilitate this, questions were
phrased in non-directed ways and were purposively broad and
open ended. The questions aimed to open up general discussion
about the participants’ perceptions of safety, and the types of
things that signified to them the value and importance of safety.
The interview schedule therefore acted as a conversation prompt
to encourage participants to think about safety from multiple an-
gles. The interviewer used floating prompts, such as repeating
key words the respondents used, and using clarifying questions
(e.g., ‘could you please explain that to me in more detail?’) to gain
greater insight. Where applicable participants were encouraged to
provide examples and describe personal experiences to elaborate
on their statements. If a topic of interest did not emerge organically
during the interview, planned prompts were used. The underlying
purpose of the questions was to ascertain what elements signalled
to employees the value and importance of safety. The prompt
questions aimed to generate thinking around three central themes:
(1) the general value that is placed on safety within the workplace
and the indicators that signal this value, (2) the degree to which
safety and productivity demands compete, and (3) the degree to
which safety is acknowledged and/or rewarded (see Appendix A
for interview questions).
2.3. Interview procedure
The interview schedule was consulted during the interview to
(1) facilitate conversation and discussion, (2) ensure all relevant
questions were raised, (3) to maintain scope and direction toward
the objective of the research, and (4) to provide probes to solicit
additional information (McCracken, 1988). The flexible interview
S.K. Colley, A. Neal / Safety Science 50 (2012) 1775–1785 1777

5. Author's personal copy
protocol was chosen over a more structured approach to maximize
disclosure, while minimizing the imposition of the interviewers’
perspective on participants’ responses (Bostrom et al., 1992). To
increase consistency, one interviewer conducted all 25 interviews.
Interviews were conducted privately, away from the work environ-
ment in a one-on-one setting during work time. At the commence-
ment of each interview the interviewer engaged the participant in
a friendly manner to increase rapport. The purpose of the
interviews was then explained. Participants were informed that
the interviews were confidential and that they did not have to
participate if they did not want to. No one refused to participate.
Participants were informed that there were no right or wrong an-
swers to the questions and were encouraged to provide unedited
and candid responses based on their personal perceptions and
experiences. With permission from each participant, interviews
were recorded and later transcribed. The interviews lasted be-
tween 20 and 60 min.
2.4. Data analysis procedure
Leximancer v3.1 was used to analyse the interview transcripts.
There are six phases to the analysis. These six phases, and the set-
tings used to analyse the current dataset, are described below.
The first phase is document selection and text pre-processing.
The interview transcripts were compiled into a Microsoft Excel
spreadsheet, with the first column identifying which employment
group the response text came from and each row representing the
responses of a single interviewee. During text-pre-processing sen-
tence boundaries were identified; stop words or words with little
semantic meaning (e.g., ‘and’) were removed; and identifier tags
were inserted in the text to enable the comparison of various
groups or set of documents. In the current study, default text
pre-processing settings were used.
The second and third phases are concept identification and
concept editing. We used automatic concept identification, with
default concept identification settings. During the concept editing
phase, Leximancer’s automatic suggestions for concepts were in-
spected for relevancy and subjected to a standard editorial process.
Concepts with little conceptual meaning (e.g., something, every-
thing, doing, look) were removed and concepts with a similar
meaning (e.g., supervisor and supervisors, reward and rewards,
talk and talks) were merged.
The fourth phase is thesaurus learning. During this phase, ma-
chine-learning allows a thesaurus definition to be developed for
each of the emergent concepts. Default thesaurus learning settings
were used.
The fifth phase is concept location. During this phase, concepts
are located and coded into the text. This phase is much like the
manual coding process involved in a traditional content analysis
process. In the current study, we elected to code the text with
the three employment group tags: ‘upper manager,’ ‘supervisor,’
and ‘worker’ to facilitate a comparison of the conceptual content
from each.
The final phase is map exploration. The concept map is con-
structed during this phase, and the concept statistic outputs are
produced. In the current study, we used the default topical
network (linear) clustering algorithm to generate the conceptual
map. The concept map and project statistics were used to
Fig. 1. Key concepts (concept size 100%; theme size 0%).
1778 S.K. Colley, A. Neal / Safety Science 50 (2012) 1775–1785

6. Author's personal copy
investigate safety climate perceptions across the entire sample,
and to compare the content of safety climate perceptions across
upper managers, supervisors and workers.
3. Results
3.1. Concepts
In total, 42 concepts were identified across the interviews as
indicators of the value and importance that is ascribed to safety.
The absolute concept counts (i.e., frequency of occurrence for a
concept) ranged from 301 for the concept ‘safety’ to 5 for the con-
cepts ‘hazards’ and ‘agenda’ (see Appendix B for the full ‘ranked
concepts statistics list’). Concept counts are naturally affected by
the size of the dataset, with higher absolute counts occurring in
larger textual sets (Martin and Rice, 1997). While some absolute
concept counts for the current study may appear quite low (i.e.,
five), they may be of interest given the relatively small study sam-
ple size.
Fig. 1 shows how the 42 concepts clustered together in a two-
dimensional space. The top 10 concepts (i.e., concepts occurring
most frequently) were ‘safety,’ ‘work,’ ‘people,’ ‘safe,’ ‘productivity,’
‘communication,’ ‘meeting,’ ‘management,’ ‘strategies,’ and ‘sys-
tem’. The most frequently occurring concept contained within
the text, ‘safety,’ is located in the center of the map. Examination
of the co-occurrences between the top 10 concepts revealed a
moderate degree of co-occurrence. The concepts ‘‘safety,’’ ‘‘com-
munication,’’ ‘‘strategies,’’ and ‘‘system’’ each co-occurred with
one another; as did the concepts ‘‘work,’’ ‘‘safe,’’ and ‘‘productiv-
ity’’; and ‘‘strategies,’’ ‘‘safe,’’ and ‘‘productivity’’; of the other top
10 concepts ‘‘people,’’ ‘‘meetings,’’ and management’’ occurred
independently.
3.2. Thematic clusters
Leximancer theme circles aid in the exploration of the semantic
relations between concepts. With theme size set at 35%, 10 mean-
ingful themes arise (see Fig. 2). Examination of the resulting map
shows that the theme of ‘safety’ emerges as central on the map,
surrounded by themes which appear to correspond to aspects of
safety climate previously identified in the academic literature:
‘equipment,’ ‘safety communication,’ ‘management practices,’ ‘pro-
cedures,’ ‘safety training,’ ‘work environment’ and ‘corporate val-
ues’. The distance between theme circles indicates the degree of
similarity between themes, with overlapping theme circles sharing
a higher degree of semantic similarity. By virtue of their close prox-
imity to one another, we can say that the 10 thematic clusters are
semantically related to one another. The central clusters surround-
ing the ‘safety’ theme appear to be being more strongly related to
one another than the ‘culture’ and ‘safety training’ themes, which
are more semantically independent. To aid interpretation Fig. 2
displays theme circles (35%) and concepts markers (100%). A
description of each of the ten themes is provided next, while Table
1 contains direct quotes illustrating each theme.
First, the ‘safety’ theme mirrors the overarching intent of the
interviews, which was to understand safety perceptions in the
workplace. The concepts within this theme relate to a core set of
safety factors that are acknowledged within the literature as being
necessary for ensuring a safe workplace (e.g., ‘system’, ‘strategies’,
and ‘communication’). As can be seen in Table 1, concern for the
Fig. 2. Concepts located within the major theme circles (concepts size 100%; theme size 35%).
S.K. Colley, A. Neal / Safety Science 50 (2012) 1775–1785 1779

7. Author's personal copy
welfare of employees is an important element of this theme. Sec-
ond, the ‘work environment’ theme contains concepts that relate
to the trade-off between the competing operational goals of safety
and productivity. Concepts include: ‘productivity,’ ‘safe,’ ‘work,’
and ‘environment.’ This theme indicates that perceived efforts to
balance these competing operational demands are an important
indicator of the value that is ascribed to safety. Third, the ‘people’
theme contains concepts that relate to duty of care or active care.
Active caring refers to planned and purposeful behaviors directed
at the environment to make the workplace safer or directed toward
co-workers to assist them to work more safely (Geller, 2001).
Concepts include: ‘people’, and ‘responsibility’.
Fourth, the ‘management practices’ theme contains concepts
that relate to practices and strategies that are used by supervisors
to enact and instil safety values. Concepts include: ‘management,’
supervisor,’ and ‘risk assessment. Further investigation of this
theme indicates that supervisors are consciously aware of strate-
gies for transmitting the safety messages from upper managers
down into the workforce, as well as the importance of their role
in transmitting the safety message to workers:
[source:supervisor21] ‘‘We have a structure where the message
gets funnelled down. We have an integrated management
system meeting, there is a safety and risk component, and we
have monthly meetings with the senior management team to
discuss all the safety statistics and issues. . .The presence of
the management and supervisory team getting out there and
selling the safety message is important.’’
Further examination also suggests that bottlenecks in transfer-
ring and reinforcing the safety message may occur, in part, because
of the communication styles and differing values of supervisors:
[source:supervisor20] ‘‘I see sometimes that the field staff don’t
believe the management staff so they will focus on productivity.
The management staff will say safety is more important stop
Table 1
Text exerts illustrating each theme.
Theme Text exert
Safety [source:worker04] ‘‘They [the organization] care about their employees, we’ve got a safety management system set up and our workplace health
and safety strategy where they do their best to advise employees of safety issues,’’
Work environment [source:worker09] I think they [the organization] value productivity but not at the expense of safety. On occasion there may be a little pressure to
get things done, but at the same time it’s get it done as quickly as possible, get it done safely, but the ultimate decision is on us in the field
[source:supervisor20] Productivity comes down to if we don’t have it we don’t have a job. But our motto is safe production so they intertwine
together, we don’t want productivity without safety
[source:uppermanager16] Safety will come ahead of productivity. When you get down in the lower consequence risks, I think it is more evenly
balanced or possibly still more against productivity
People [source:worker01] We are all aware that safety is everybody’s responsibility on site, if anybody does see anything they should bring it to someone’s
attention so that is can be addressed
[source:supervisor17] It’s about communication of safety to the staff. And that’s my responsibility to communicate the safety out there and have
the people working as safely as possible through identifying hazards, doing risk assessments, and putting controls in place to make sure these
risks are out of the business
[source:uppermanager16] Awareness of responsibility for others in the management and supervisory ranks has enormously increased from where
it was
Management
practices
[source:worker02] In my opinion he [my supervisor] is really switched onto safety. We do monthly inspections, at tool box talks he will talk about
anyone who has any safety problems that need fixing up. If there is a safety problem he will address it straight away. People have got the option of
going up to him at any time
[source:worker03] He [my supervisor] does the morning safety talks and runs us through the safety spiel. He always says if you have problems
getting safety equipment come and see me and we will make a special recommendation to get the item approved. If he spots you not wearing
your PPE he gives you a bit of a prompt. He’s fairly reasonable but he is fairly diligent
[source:supervisor20] I have a thing that I do, a morning talk, a pre work safety check. I’m very big on pre work safety checks. And I stress to people
that they should step back take a few seconds, look at their jobs scan their jobs remove the hazards. Taking a little bit to get through but I believe
that it is happening. And looking out for your mates is a flow on from there. They actively identify and remove hazards
Corporate values [source:uppermanager15] Safety is the number one issue of all the messaging we do around any issues within the organization, this is a transport
industry, we have people’s lives in our responsibility. Within [organization X], the organization both by the decision making and the money it
invests demonstrates that it really is committed to safety
[source:uppermanager16] If you look at all of our organizational material, in a corporate sense, you’re always finding the word safety. You’re
always finding the word safety in mission statements, you’re always finding it represented in annual reports in some shape or form
Safety
communication
[source:worker07] You have your safety bulletins, they come out not on a regular basis but when deficiencies in the system have been identified
they put out a safety bulletin to emphasize the new rules. They have their SPAD (signal passed at danger) magazines that reinforce the dangers or
any events that might have happened that might have involved SPADS. I suppose there is not just the safety bulletins, but there’s probably regular
communication from the CE himself reinforcing safety, probably once a month about the importance of safety as well
[source:supervisor17] It’s about communication of safety to the staff. And that’s my responsibility to communicate the safety out there and have
the people working as safely as possible...Communication is paramount for anything and especially with safety out here
Equipment [source:supervisor20] All of the equipment here is under a very strong high quality system, e.g., routing maintenance. On the locomotives they do
quite a lot of inspections. On our overhauls we have minor and major inspections. We have a program in place that is preventative maintenance,
rather than maintenance when it breaks. So quite a lot of preventative maintenance is put in
Procedures [source:worker05] They have a set of standards and specifications that determine how you run trains and it’s my job to put those into play to
ensure the correct separation of trains and we can’t vary from that. They are rigid rules the controller has to obey
[source:supervisor20] The safety procedures that we have to go through before a locomotive is ready to go back are stringent
Culture [source:supervisor17] Throughout the last 4–5 years we have been changing the culture of people and the way they work and that comes through
our chief executive and as I stated before we don’t want to have people going home injured or anything like that
[source:uppermanager16] We’ve had constant improvement in safety performance over a long period of time. The only reason you get constant
improvement in safety is the various cultures and initiatives and systems and processes that the organization puts in place
Training [source:worker07] We do our training on safety in terms of track and tack side safety, updating the skills on that each year
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that sort of work and the productivity can suffer. I know the
senior management have that line and will support staff who
do that, but I haven’t seen the confidence in the operational staff
yet to believe that. I think the breakdown might be in the com-
munication style of the workshop supervisors. They have a
different value set.’’
Fifth, the ‘corporate values’ theme contains concepts that relate
to the values that are transmitted by upper level managers (i.e.,
corporate) about the organizations’ overall view and stance on
safety. Concepts include: ‘corporate,’ ‘business,’ and ‘group.’ Sixth,
the ‘safety communication’ theme contains concepts that relate
to strategies used to disseminate information about safety issues
and topics. Concepts include: ‘toolbox,’ ‘alerts,’ ‘meetings,’ ‘issues,’
and ‘agenda.’ Seventh, the ‘equipment’ theme contains concepts
that relate to the maintenance and updating of equipment and
tools. Concepts include: ‘equipment’ ‘preventative maintenance,’
and ‘inspections.’ Eighth, the ‘procedures’ theme contains concepts
that relate to the safety associated standards and procedures,
which are put in place to guide behavior. Concepts include ‘proce-
dures’ ‘standards,’ and ‘rules.’ Ninth, the ‘culture’ theme suggests
employees perceive safety as a component of the wider culture
within the organization. Lastly, the ‘training’ theme suggests
employees perceive safety training is an important aspect of safety.
3.3. Qualitative differences between upper manager, supervisor and
worker schemas
Fig. 2 displays the themes that are most closely related to each
group, while Table 2 displays the 10 concepts most closely related
to each group. As can be seen in Fig. 2, the three group tags do not
appear in close proximity to one another, and cluster around differ-
ent concepts and themes on the map. At the concept and theme
level, each group appears to conceptualize safety climate in differ-
ent ways. At the concept level, upper managers appear to be heav-
ily concerned with higher-level organizational concepts that signal
the value the organization places on safety (e.g., ‘culture,’ ‘chief-
executive,’ ‘corporate,’ ‘people,’ and ‘responsibility’). This pattern
is mirrored at the theme level, with upper managers being most
closely related to the ‘culture,’ and ‘people,’ themes. At the concept
level, supervisors appear to be concerned with a mix of concepts
that relate to higher-level organizational factors that signal the
value that is placed on safety within the organization (e.g., ‘corpo-
rate,’ ‘management,’ ‘business’) and lower-level operational con-
cepts that relate to practical ways that safety values are enacted
in the workplace (e.g., ‘meeting,’ and ‘alerts’). This pattern is also
mirrored at the theme level, with supervisors being most closely
related to ‘corporate values,’ ‘management practices,’ and closely
overlapping ‘safety communication,’ themes. Workers appear to
be primarily concerned with lower-level operational concepts that
relate to the practical and tangible ways that safety is enacted
within the workplace (e.g., ‘rules,’ ‘procedures,’ ‘standards,’ ‘bulle-
tins,’). This pattern is also mirrored at the theme level, with
workers being most closely related to the ‘procedures,’ and ‘safety
training,’ themes.
4. Discussion
The current study used automated text analysis to explore the
content of safety climate schema in a sample of individuals work-
ing in a government rail company. Results from this study provide
further insight into the differences between the safety schema of
upper managers, supervisors, and workers. The following discus-
sion describes the findings and their relevance to safety climate
theory. We first discuss the similarities and differences amongst
the themes that emerged from the interviews and existing
descriptions of safety climate, and then evaluate how safety sche-
ma vary across levels within the organization. We then discuss the
application of these results, as well as potential limitations and
suggestions for future research.
4.1. Summary and interpretation of findings
The first point to note about the results is that the themes that
emerged from the analysis can be mapped onto existing descrip-
tions of safety climate. Of the 10 emergent themes, seven can be
directly mapped onto established components of safety climate
(see Table 3). The identification of these seven common themes
provides validation for the qualitative methodology and analysis
procedures employed in the current study. These themes were
extracted automatically by the machine learning algorithm, and
did not require hand coding or human intervention, other than
minimal editing to remove redundancy. Furthermore, many of
the themes emerged without prompting from the interviewer.
Themes such as ‘management practices’, ‘equipment’, ‘procedures’
and ‘training’ were not directly addressed by the interview ques-
tions. The fact that the algorithm was able to extract themes that
correspond to the components of safety climate that emerge from
factor analyses carried out on questionnaire data suggests that the
method is valid.
In addition to identifying seven common safety climate themes,
the analysis also revealed two additional themes –‘culture,’ and
‘people.’ Again, these themes were not directly addressed by the
interview questions. The ‘culture’ theme suggests employees per-
ceive safety is a component of the wider culture within the organi-
zation. Within the safety climate literature, organizational culture
has received relatively little attention. However, within the general
organizational behavior literature, models of organizational cul-
ture suggest that culture influences climate perceptions (Aarons
and Sawitzky, 2006a,b; Poole, 1985; Glisson and James, 2002).
Therefore, the identification of the ‘culture’ theme in the current
study warrants further investigation to examine the interplay
between organizational culture and safety climate. Examining
organizational culture, in the context of safety climate, should
Table 2
Top 10 concepts associated with upper managers, supervisors and workers.
Upper managers Supervisors Workers
Hazards Group Rules
Culture Level Co-workers
Inspection Business Training
Responsibility Management Agenda
Environment Corporate Reporting
Preventative maintenance Company-name Procedure
Chief-executive Risk_assessment Equipment
Corporate Meeting Standards
People Supervisor Important
Reporting Alerts Bulletins
Table 3
Emergent safety themes and corresponding safety climate factors.
Emergent themes Corresponding safety climate factor
Management practices Management practicesa,b
Corporate values Management commitment to safetya,b
Safety communication Safety communicationb
Equipment Safety equipmentb
Procedures Safety systems and proceduresa
Safety training Safety training and competencea,b
Work environment Risk in the environmenta,b
and work pressuresb
a
Guldenmund, 2000.
b
Griffin and Neal, 2000.
S.K. Colley, A. Neal / Safety Science 50 (2012) 1775–1785 1781

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focus on identifying the patterns of organizational meaning that
are shared among the members of a group, the way these influence
safety climate, and the role that safety climate plays in the devel-
opment and maintenance of this broader culture (Antonsen, 2009).
The ‘people’ theme reflects an awareness of a responsibility or
duty of care to look out for other people’s safety. Legislation (e.g.,
Workplace Health and Safety Act, 2007) stipulates that workers
have a legal responsibility to take care of themselves and others
in matters of health and safety (Occupational Health and Safety,
2000). The enactment of this legislation appears to be reflected
by the presence of this theme in which workers mention the
importance of being responsible for the safety of themselves and
their co-workers. Studies have previously examined the effects of
internal group processes on safety outcomes. Internal group pro-
cesses that have been examined include backup, communication
and trust (see Christian et al., 2009). The ‘people’ theme appears
to describe the reasons why employees should engage in these
types of behaviors, which in this organization, are based on con-
cepts of duty, responsibility and obligation. This is consistent with
recent findings from a study of safety climate in a university facil-
ities department (Wallace and Chen, 2006). Wallace and Chen
(2006) found that groups with a positive safety climate tend to
adopt a prevention focus, which is characterized by a concern for
duty and obligation (Higgins, 1997). In principle, however, there
could be other reasons for why the safety of people at work is
valued. For example, safety could be framed as an ideal that people
aspire to, rather than as a duty or responsibility (Higgins, 1997).
Relatively little is known about the way in which underlying moti-
vational orientations in relation to workplace safety vary across
organizations or jurisdictions. We believe that this is a fruitful ave-
nue for future research.
The major question that this study examined was whether there
are differences in the safety schema of upper managers, supervi-
sors and workers. Previous research has used climate surveys to
demonstrate differences in the level and strength of perceptions
on a predefined set of safety climate factors. However, the current
study addressed a different question, namely it aimed to identify
the similarities and differences among managers, supervisors and
workers in the way that they view safety. Results suggest that
safety schema, like other types of schema, are largely ego-centric
in that safety schema appear to align with the role responsibilities
of the individual. In relation to safety, the role of upper managers
and supervisors is largely to devise and implement organizational
safety priorities. Results indicated that organizational safety prior-
ities and managerial safety practices were central themes in the
safety schema of these groups. The role of workers however, is to
perform the duties of their role in a way that is safe, and does
not harm themselves or others. Results indicated that safety proce-
dures and safety training were central themes in the safety schema
of workers. This finding supports the assumptions underlying
Zohar’s (2008) multi-level model of safety climate and are reflec-
tive of findings by Hine et al. (1999) who noticed that senior man-
agers tended to align better with company safety principles than
workers.
Whilst the overall pattern of results was consistent with what
would be expected, given the roles and responsibilities of people
at different levels within the organization, there were two aspects
of the findings that were unexpected. These relate to the position
of corporate values and the work environment on the concept
map (Fig. 2). The results suggest that corporate values were more
central to supervisors’ schema than to senior managers’ schema.
We expected that corporate values would be more central to senior
managers’ understanding of safety, because they play an important
role in establishing corporate values, and transmitting them. It
appears that corporate values play an important role for supervi-
sors in the way that they approach and deal with safety. In retro-
spect, this is not surprising, given that the role of the supervisor
is to translate these values into practice. The results also suggest
that issues relating to the work environment, such as the trade-
off between safety and productivity, are more central for senior
managers than for supervisors. We expected that the work envi-
ronment would be of direct concern to supervisors, because they
have to deal with these issues on a daily basis. Instead, it appears
that these issues are viewed in more strategic terms, being closely
linked to senior managers’ concerns regarding duty of care to
employees.
4.2. Implications and applications
We believe that the current study makes a number of method-
ological and practical contributions. From a methodological per-
spective, the results show that Leximancer is a useful tool for
qualitative analysis in this domain. Traditional methods for quali-
tative data analysis are time consuming and highly subjective.
The automatic concept learning algorithms and mapping processes
utilized by Leximancer overcome one of the major concerns with
qualitative methods, namely that the themes reflect the prior
beliefs and expectations of the researcher. By applying these algo-
rithms and mapping procedures Leximancer enables qualitative
data to be more objectively analyzed and interpreted (Watson
et al., 2005). This is important because there have been repeated
calls for better qualitative research within the safety domain to ad-
vance safety theories and concepts (e.g., Frone and Barling, 2004;
Zohar, 2003). Furthermore, the use of machine learning enables
far larger quantities of text to be analyzed than has been the case
previously. Automated text analysis tools, such as Lexiancer, are
being used to analyze large databases of text, derived from a range
of sources, including the internet, email, and company or govern-
ment databases (e.g., Grech et al. 2002; Hewett et al., 2009; Fisk
et al., 2009). We believe that the research method and analytic pro-
cedure used in the current study may have broad applicability
within the safety domain, allowing the field to examine questions
that cannot be easily addressed using employee surveys.
There are also practical implications that flow from developing
a better understanding of safety schema. According to schema the-
ory, schemas are largely ego-centric. That is, people largely inter-
pret the world through their own personal schema and look for
meaningfully related concepts that fit their existing schema
(Anderson, 1984). This implies that misaligned safety schema
across groups may result in miscommunication about the impor-
tance of safety. Firstly, the ego-centric nature of safety schema
means that managers are more likely to emphasize components
of safety which are prominent in their personal safety schema
(i.e., corporate values and organizational safety priorities), and give
less attention to topics which are central to the safety schema of
workers (e.g., practices, procedures, training). Secondly, managers
are often required to manage dual goals of productivity/efficiency
and safety. If a productivity schema is more salient and important
in the thinking of individual managers they may over-emphasize
productivity and under-emphasize safety. Thirdly, information
that is communicated to workers that is inconsistent with their
existing schema may not be recalled as easily and may be given
less attention and even possibly ignored (Edwards and McDonald,
1993). When these reasons are combined it becomes important to
develop and implement strategies to minimize miscommunication
arising from misaligned safety schema.
One potential strategy is to ensure that managers and supervi-
sors, in their safety communications, use concepts that can be eas-
ily translated into actions consistent with the concepts used by
workers. For upper managers, this means ensuring safety policy
and company mission statements are written and communicated
in a manner that resonates with the safety schema of workers.
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Often, upper management try to instil safety values within an orga-
nization via mission statements and value statements (Sabourin,
2000). These tools however, seldom work and there is often
considerable ‘disconnect’ between what management thinks hap-
pens and what employees know happens (Sabourin, 2000). To be
successful in instilling and aligning safety values across an organi-
zation, upper managers may benefit from paying close attention to
the way they transmit the company’s safety message, making sure
they use terms and concepts that are consistent with the safety
schema of workers.
Second, managers and supervisors need to be aware of their
own ego-centric views on safety and make conscious efforts to
not overlay personal motives and goals about safety/work (e.g.,
work pressures from upper management) onto workers. Supervi-
sors in particular also need to be aware of their workers views
on safety so they can consciously tap into these schemas in their
daily communications. With this knowledge, supervisors can im-
prove safety communication by paying deliberate attention to
those elements of safety that are important within their workers’
safety schemas (e.g., continually reviewing and, when appropriate,
updating practices, procedures and safety training). At the same
time, supervisors may also benefit from emphasizing concepts
and issues that fall outside the key focus of their workers safety
schema. Paying closer attention to these issues will help ensure
these issues are not overlooked and are adequately processed
and taken on board.
A final strategy for aligning safety schema across groups is to
facilitate a process whereby different groups take on the perspec-
tive of other groups. For example, individuals could be asked to
construct what concepts and themes they believe would be central
in the other group’s safety schema. A more elaborate and detailed
schema for a group makes taking the perspective of another group
easier and is suggestive of a coherent safety climate. If an impres-
sion of another group’s view on safety is hard to form or is inaccu-
rate, that group cannot be considered to possess an accurate stance
on safety climate and in these cases communication issues may be
amplified.
4.3. Limitations
The current study has several potential limitations. First,
researchers often let bias infiltrate qualitative research (Yin,
1994), either through the choice of interview questions, or the
interpretation of responses. Our interview questions focused on
the defining feature of safety climate, namely the value that is
placed on safety within the organization. For this reason, it is not
surprising that the analysis extracted themes relating to values
and priorities. However, as noted above, the analysis did extract
themes that were not directly suggested by the interview ques-
tions. We believe that this is because we used a flexible interview
protocol, in preference to a more structured approach. The use of a
semi-structured interview enabled us to maximize disclosure,
while minimizing the imposition of the interviewers’ perspective
on participant’s responses (Bostrom et al., 1992). Furthermore, as
mentioned above, we used automatic text analysis which removed
bias associated with theme and concept selection.
There are also limitations associated with the sample. The sam-
ple consisted of 27 staff from a single organization within a single
country. It is possible that the results may not generalize to other
staff within the organization, to other organizations, or to other
countries. However, whilst the sample of staff within the organiza-
tion is small, it is representative of the different managerial and
non-managerial groups within the organization. Furthermore, con-
ceptual saturation appeared to have been achieved by the final few
interviews as very similar responses were being produced. Conse-
quently, additional interviews were unlikely to have added any
significant new information. Finally, the organization itself (a
freight and passenger rail company) is representative of many
organizations within the transport sector in western economies.
Whilst there is undoubtedly substantial variation in the level of
safety climate across organizations within this sector, the types
of issues that emerged from the analysis are similar to those iden-
tified within the broader safety climate literature, suggesting that
this sample is not unique. What is less clear, however, is whether
the inter-relationships amongst the elements within the concept
map, and the differences amongst employees, supervisors and
managers, are unique to the current sample or are more broadly
representative.
4.4. Conclusions
Farrington-Darby et al. (2005) have commented that ‘‘while
there is great value in the use of safety climate tools for problem
detection and for measuring changes over time and after the
implementation of change, there are also limitations to their
use.’’ (p. 44). Interview data is rich and can provide insights that
go beyond what a survey can provide. By using a qualitative meth-
odology we were able to identify which components of safety cli-
mate were dominant in the schema of upper managers,
supervisors and workers. Better understanding of group differ-
ences informs where gaps or discrepancies in safety perceptions
exist and assists in identifying specific groups to target interven-
tions aimed at aligning safety schema and improving safety com-
munication (Findley et al., 2006; Zohar, 2000).
Appendix A
Interview questions
1. Do you think safety is valued here? What gives you this
impression?
2. What do you think is valued more, safety or productivity
(e.g., on-time running)? What gives you this impression?
3. Who do you think is rewarded or recognized more: (1)
employees who work safely, or (2) employees who meet
work targets? What gives you this impression?
4. Do you think your employees/co-workers/supervisor
value safety? What gives you this impression?
5. What do you think your employees/co-workers/
supervisor value more, safety or productivity (e.g., on-
time running)? What gives you this impression?
6. Who do you think your employees/coworkers/supervisor
reward or recognize more: (1) people who work safely,
or (2) people who meet work targets? What gives you
this impression?
7. Do you feel comfortable raising safety issues with your
employees/co-workers/supervisor? Why or why not?
8. Do you and your employees/co-workers/supervisor talk
to each other about safety related issues that might affect
them?
9. How would you describe the relationship you have with
your employees/co-workers/supervisor?
10. Do any aspects of safety need improving? If so what and
why?
11. Have you or someone you know been involved in a safety
incident that did/or had the potential to cause significant
harm/injury to property or people?
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Appendix B
Ranked concept list
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Rank Concept Count Relevance (%) Rank Concept Count Relevance (%)
1 Safety 301 100 22 Level 15 5
2 Work 105 35 23 Procedure 14 5
3 People 93 31 24 Culture 13 4
4 Safe 86 29 25 Reporting 12 4
5 Productivity 60 20 26 Toolbox 11 4
6 Communication 31 10 27 Training 11 4
7 Meeting 30 10 28 Performance 10 3
8 Management 29 10 29 Bulletins 10 3
9 Strategies 29 10 30 Defects 10 3
10 System 27 9 31 Co-workers 10 3
11 Risk_assessment 26 9 32 Inspection 9 3
12 Valued 25 8 33 Preventative_maintenance 9 3
13 Company-name 24 8 34 Rules 9 3
14 Issues 24 8 35 Equipment 9 3
15 Important 24 8 36 Corporate 7 2
16 Group 23 8 37 Responsibility 7 2
17 Supervisor 23 8 38 Chief-executive 6 2
18 Environment 22 7 39 Alerts 6 2
19 Business 17 6 40 On-time 6 2
20 Rewarded 17 6 41 Agenda 5 2
21 Standards 17 6 42 Hazards 5 2
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