Promoting safety through diversity management: diversity climate, racial ethnicity, and safety voice

Abstract

Given a sustained increase and undue burden of work-related injury and illness among racial-ethnic minorities in the United States, the current study aimed to provide a preliminary understanding into mechanisms which might lend to occupational health disparities. I utilized a two-wave survey approach via Prolific, a web-based survey platform, to gather perceptions from workers in high-risk industries (e.g., construction, manufacturing, healthcare, etc.) relating to their work groups' diversity climate, perceived organizational identification and psychological safety, worker safety voice, and occupational safety and health history. I considered four research questions: 1) How do employee perceptions of their organization's diversity climate relate to worker safety voice, 2) Do workers' perceptions of psychological safety and organizational commitment mediate the relationship between perceived diversity climate and worker safety voice, 3) What racial-ethnic differences exist in the indirect effects of diversity climate on worker safety voice via psychological safety and organizational identification?, and 4) If racial-ethnic difference in safety voice exist, are they also associated with differences in self-reported occurrences of accidents, injuries, or work-related illnesses across racial-ethnic groups? Results demonstrate the indirect effect of diversity climate on safety voice is significant via psychological safety, but not organizational identity. However, these effects did not influence occupational incident occurrence by race/ethnicity. I discuss relevant implications for theory and practice.