Table of Contents
Abstract
The Psychological Contract of Safety Scale is an innovative psychometric instrument designed to capture the unwritten, reciprocal expectations regarding Occupational safety between workers and their organizations. Rooted in Social exchange theory, it extends the traditional concept of the psychological contract into the domain of workplace safety. The tool evaluates what Employees believe their employers owe them regarding safety protection, as well as what they believe they owe the organization in return.
Developed to address a gap in Safety climate literature, the scale moves beyond simple safety attitudes to measure the perceived mutual obligations that drive safety behavior. By quantifying these implicit agreements, researchers and practitioners can better understand how trust and Reciprocity influence compliance with safety protocols. The instrument is particularly valuable for diagnosing potential breakdowns in safety culture before they lead to accidents or injuries.
📊 Psychometric Scorecard
38
Multidimensional
0.98
📍 Australia
Authors
Purpose
The primary purpose of this instrument is to provide a standardized method for assessing the reciprocal safety commitments perceived by Employees. While existing Safety climate measures often focus on management's overt commitment to safety or general workplace hazards, they frequently overlook the transactional and relational exchanges that govern daily employee behavior. This scale fills that critical gap by operationalizing safety as a two-way social exchange.
For organizational psychologists and safety professionals, this tool offers a nuanced diagnostic capability. It allows practitioners to identify discrepancies between what management believes it is providing and what Employees perceive they are receiving. Understanding these Psychological contracts is essential for developing interventions that foster a proactive safety culture, improve job satisfaction, and reduce workplace incidents through enhanced mutual trust.
Construct
The psychological contract of safety is grounded in Social exchange theory and the norm of Reciprocity, positing that human relationships are formed through subjective cost-benefit analyses and the comparison of alternatives. In the context of this scale, the construct is defined as an individual's belief regarding the reciprocal safety obligations that exist between themselves and their employer. Although the contract is unilateral—meaning it exists within the mind of the individual employee—it encompasses both employer and employee duties.
The construct is multidimensional, reflecting the established architecture of general Psychological contracts. It is divided into two primary domains: Employer Obligations and Employee Obligations. Within these domains, the scale further differentiates between transactional obligations, which are typically explicit, short-term, and compliance-based, and relational obligations, which are implicit, long-term, and socio-emotional in nature. This dual-structure allows for a comprehensive mapping of how workers perceive the safety dynamic in their specific organizational environment.
Validity
The validation process for the instrument incorporated multiple methodological phases to ensure robust psychometric properties. Initial content and face validity were established through expert review, ensuring the generated items accurately reflected both theoretical constructs and practical workplace realities. The pilot phase utilized diverse occupational groups, including nurses and construction workers, to confirm the scale's relevance across different high-risk environments.
Construct validity was subsequently demonstrated through exploratory factor analytic techniques on a larger validation sample. The analysis successfully recovered the theoretical two-factor structure—transactional and relational obligations—for both the employer and employee subscales. This structural alignment with broader Organizational Psychology literature provides strong evidence that the scale accurately captures the intended dimensions of social exchange within a safety context.
Reliability
The instrument demonstrates excellent internal consistency, a critical requirement for scales measuring complex organizational attitudes. During the initial item analysis phase, the preliminary item pools yielded exceptionally high reliability coefficients, with the employer obligations scale reaching a Cronbach's alpha of 0.98.
Following rigorous item reduction techniques—which eliminated redundant, ambiguous, or statistically problematic items—the final 21-item employer and 17-item employee scales maintained strong psychometric integrity. The high alpha values indicate that the retained items share a high degree of covariance and reliably measure the underlying dimensions of the psychological contract of safety without unnecessary participant burden.
Factor Analysis
The structural integrity of the scale was evaluated using factor analytic procedures on a substantial sample of healthcare workers. Prior to the main analysis, preliminary item screening utilized corrected item-total correlations, skewness indices, and squared multiple correlations to identify and remove poorly performing items, ensuring a clean correlation matrix for extraction.
The subsequent factor analysis revealed a clear multidimensional structure that mapped perfectly onto theoretical expectations. For both the employer and employee obligation item pools, the analysis extracted two distinct factors representing transactional and relational components. This empirical confirmation of the dual-factor structure indicates that Employees cognitively differentiate between short-term, explicit safety exchanges and long-term, trust-based safety commitments.
Subscales
| Subscale | Items | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Employer Obligations – Transactional | Measures perceived explicit, short-term, and observable safety commitments provided by the employer, such as specific training or rewards. | |
| Employer Obligations – Relational | Measures perceived implicit, long-term, socio-emotional safety commitments from the employer, such as trust and a non-punitive reporting culture. | |
| Employee Obligations – Transactional | Measures the employee's perceived explicit, compliance-based duties toward organizational safety. | |
| Employee Obligations – Relational | Measures the employee's perceived implicit, socio-emotional commitments to maintaining a safe work environment. |
Instrument
| Test Type | Self-report questionnaire |
| Format | 38 items (21 employer obligations, 17 employee obligations), 11-point rating scale (0-10) |
| Scoring | Items are scored from 0 (obligation not at all met) to 10 (obligation completely met). Scores are aggregated to form subscale totals for employer and employee obligations. |
| Language | English |
| Population | Employees, Healthcare professionals |
| Age Group | Adults |
| Administration | Self-administered |
Psychological Contract of Safety Scale Items
Items are currently not available
The individual items of this scale are not publicly available. Researchers interested in using this instrument should contact the original authors directly to request the scale materials.
Sample
The pilot study included 99 participants from diverse occupations (32 nurses, 29 construction workers, 38 meat processing workers). The main validation study utilized a larger sample of 424 health care workers.
Permissions & Test Year
Copyright 2010 National Safety Council and Elsevier Ltd.
Test Year: 2010
Cite This Paper
Arlene Walker (2010). Psychological Contract of Safety Scale. Journal of Safety Research. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2010.06.002
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Cite this article
Mohammed looti (2026). Psychological Contract of Safety Scale. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES. Retrieved from https://scales.arabpsychology.com/s/psychological-contract-of-safety-scale/
Mohammed looti. "Psychological Contract of Safety Scale." PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES, 13 Aug. 2026, https://scales.arabpsychology.com/s/psychological-contract-of-safety-scale/.
Mohammed looti. "Psychological Contract of Safety Scale." PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES, 2026. https://scales.arabpsychology.com/s/psychological-contract-of-safety-scale/.
Mohammed looti (2026) 'Psychological Contract of Safety Scale', PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES. Available at: https://scales.arabpsychology.com/s/psychological-contract-of-safety-scale/.
[1] Mohammed looti, "Psychological Contract of Safety Scale," PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES, vol. X, no. Y, ص Z-Z, August, 2026.
Mohammed looti. Psychological Contract of Safety Scale. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCALES. 2026;vol(issue):pages.