Psychological Contract of Safety Scale

1. Abstract

The Psychological Contract of Safety Scale is an advanced, theoretically grounded psychometric instrument formulated to assess the implicit, unwritten, and reciprocal expectations regarding occupational safety operating between employees and their organizations. Grounded in social exchange theory and the universal norm of reciprocity, this measurement scale shifts occupational health research away from static perceptual appraisals of environmental hazards toward dynamic, relational evaluations of mutual obligation fulfillment. The scale comprises a comprehensive 38-item structure bifurcated into two foundational domains: Employer Obligations (21 items) and Employee Obligations (17 items). Within each domain, the instrument operationalizes obligations across two distinct operational dimensions: transactional obligations—encompassing tangible, concrete, short-term, and compliance-driven safety parameters—and relational obligations—encompassing implicit, socio-emotional, long-term, and trust-oriented safety dynamics.

Administered via an 11-point metric continuum ranging from 0 (Obligation not at all met) to 10 (Obligation completely met), the instrument provides a sensitive diagnostic apparatus capable of evaluating both contractual breadth and fulfillment parity. Psychometric evaluation conducted during extensive scale development in Australia—including exploratory item screening, preliminary pilot investigations across diverse high-risk vocational cohorts (nurses, commercial construction laborers, and meat processing workers), and large-scale validation within healthcare organizations (N = 424)—demonstrated exceptional psychometric robustness. The subscales exhibit remarkable internal consistency, yielding Cronbach’s alpha coefficients reaching up to α = .98 for employer obligations, accompanied by distinct factor structures that mirror theoretical expectations of social exchange. The Psychological Contract of Safety Scale serves as an indispensable tool for organizational psychologists, safety engineers, human factors researchers, and organizational leadership seeking to identify latent breakdowns in safety culture, mitigate psychological contract breach, and cultivate proactive, high-reliability workplace environments.

2. Keywords

Psychological contract, occupational health and safety, social exchange theory, safety climate, reciprocity, transactional obligations, relational obligations, workplace injuries, organizational psychology, scale validation, employee obligations, safety behavior

3. Authors

The scale was developed and empirically validated by:

• Arlene Walker, Ph.D. — School of Psychology, Faculty of Health, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, Australia. Email: [email protected]

Dr. Walker’s research program encompasses organizational behavior, workplace health and ergonomics, employee well-being, and the operational application of psychological contract frameworks within high-hazard and safety-critical vocational environments.

4. Purpose

Traditional diagnostic tools in the domain of safety climate and occupational ergonomics have historically focused on employees’ overt perceptions of managerial prioritization, physical environmental safety systems, hazard control mechanisms, and the stringency of compliance enforcement. While these conventional instruments elucidate general perceptions of the workplace climate, they frequently fail to capture the underlying cognitive and motivational catalysts that govern day-to-day safety compliance and safety citizenship behaviors. The primary purpose of the Psychological Contract of Safety Scale is to operationalize workplace safety as a continuous, dynamic, two-way social exchange process, thereby addressing a longstanding empirical and theoretical omission in industrial and organizational psychology literature.

From an applied organizational and diagnostic perspective, safety systems frequently disintegrate not because technical controls are deficient, but because of psychological contract breach—a perceptual breakdown where workers believe management has failed to honor implicit promises of protection, psychological safety, and reciprocal support. When workers perceive such breaches, their cognitive appraisal leads to diminished motivation to maintain safety citizenship behaviors, decreased incident reporting, and an increased propensity to engage in safety shortcuts or non-compliant actions. The scale fulfills a critical diagnostic purpose by identifying perceptual misalignments between managerial assumptions and employee realities before such fractures manifest as catastrophic accidents, industrial injuries, or widespread organizational disengagement.

In research settings, this instrument offers a psychometrically validated architecture for examining complex structural equations linking the employee-organization relationship (EOR) to objective safety indicators, near-miss events, musculoskeletal strains, and psychosocial hazards. Furthermore, because the instrument measures both employer obligations and employee obligations concurrently, researchers can model reciprocal asymmetry, assessing whether unbalanced perceptions of obligation fulfillment moderate the relationship between organizational leadership styles (e.g., transformational leadership, servant leadership, leader-member exchange [LMX]) and objective safety performance across safety-critical industry sectors.

5. Psychological Construct

The central construct operationalized by this instrument is the psychological contract of safety. Deriving from the foundational psychological contract literature established by Argyris, Levinson, and modern organizational theorists such as Denise Rousseau, a psychological contract refers to an individual employee’s subjective beliefs regarding the reciprocal terms, mutual promises, and obligations underpinning the employment relationship. In the context of occupational health, the safety psychological contract is conceptualized as an employee’s cognitive schema concerning what the organization is obligated to provide to safeguard physical and psychological well-being, coupled with the corresponding behavioral, compliance, and discretionary duties the employee feels obligated to deliver in return.

Critically, although psychological contracts are fundamentally unilateral—existing entirely within the subjective cognitive architecture of the individual employee—they structurally incorporate mental representations of both parties’ mutual responsibilities. The Psychological Contract of Safety construct is multidimensional, divided into two overarching structural domains that are each subdivided into two distinct operational dimensions:

1. Employer Obligations Domain

This domain captures the spectrum of commitments that employees perceive their organizational leadership, supervisors, and senior executives owe them regarding health, protection, and risk mitigation.

• Transactional Employer Obligations: These obligations are characterized by explicit, concrete, highly tangible, short-term, and utilitarian commitments. They center predominantly on administrative and physical compliance structures. Examples include providing mandatory personal protective equipment (PPE), ensuring ergonomic machinery maintenance, adhering to statutory legal requirements, offering structured safety induction programs, and establishing formalized hazard compensation or incentive schemes. Transactional exchanges are delimited, instrumental, and require minimal emotional investment.
• Relational Employer Obligations: These obligations encompass implicit, socio-emotional, long-term, open-ended, and trust-intensive commitments. Rather than merely adhering to regulatory baselines, relational obligations reflect organizational benevolence, genuine care, and psychological safety. Examples include management listening attentively to employee concerns without defensiveness, fostering a non-punitive incident reporting culture, demonstrating authentic empathy following an occupational injury, treating worker well-being as intrinsically valuable rather than secondary to productivity quotas, and investing in worker longevity.

2. Employee Obligations Domain

This domain captures the personal responsibilities and behavioral standards that employees believe they owe to their employer, supervisors, and peer colleagues in exchange for employment and protection.

• Transactional Employee Obligations: These obligations reflect explicit, contractual, task-oriented, and compliance-driven responsibilities. They encompass adhering to standard operating procedures (SOPs), wearing prescribed safety apparatus, attending mandatory safety training seminars, completing operational checklists, and refraining from designated high-risk physical behaviors. They represent baseline, non-negotiable workplace duties defined by the technical parameters of the job role.
• Relational Employee Obligations: These obligations transcend baseline contractual compliance, closely aligning with safety citizenship behavior (SCB). They are discretionary, socio-emotional, and prosocial commitments oriented toward preserving the safety collective. Examples include actively coaching colleagues on safer operational methods, initiating voluntary safety improvements, speaking up about subtle ergonomic hazards, displaying personal accountability for group welfare, and sustaining a cooperative, trust-based safety dialogue with management even in the absence of external monitoring.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical bedrock of the Psychological Contract of Safety Scale is situated at the intersection of three major organizational and sociological paradigms: Social Exchange Theory, the Norm of Reciprocity, and Psychological Contract Theory.

Social Exchange Theory & The Norm of Reciprocity

Grounded in the foundational works of Peter Blau (1964) and Alvin Gouldner (1960), social exchange theory posits that organizational relationships are driven by ongoing, interdependent, contingent interactions that generate expectations of reciprocal reward. Unlike purely economic exchanges—which are characterized by immediate, quantifiable, and legally enforceable transfers—social exchanges involve the trade of unspecified, socio-emotional resources characterized by diffuse future obligations and the necessity of mutual trust. Gouldner’s universal norm of reciprocity dictates that individuals feel internally compelled to respond favorably to positive treatment received from others, and conversely, to withhold cooperation or respond punitively when expectations are unmet.

When applied to occupational safety (as explored in conceptual frameworks by Hofmann et al., 2003; Walker, 2006), safety performance ceases to be solely a function of technical engineering or bureaucratic coercion. Instead, safety behaviors function as an exchange currency. When organizations invest heavily in employee safety—demonstrating benevolence, providing ergonomic resources, and respecting worker input—workers perceive a state of relational debt. To re-establish psychological equilibrium and reciprocate this support, employees actively contribute enhanced compliance, vigilant situational awareness, and discretionary safety citizenship.

Psychological Contract Architecture

Denise Rousseau’s (1990, 1995) seminal conceptualization of psychological contracts provides the structural typology distinguishing transactional from relational contracts. In Rousseau’s framework, transactional agreements are grounded in clear, observable exchanges of task performance for economic compensation, characterized by narrow scope, low emotional involvement, and immediate temporal horizons. In contrast, relational agreements are premised on affective commitment, mutual loyalty, and long-term socio-emotional attachment.

The Psychological Contract of Safety Scale transposes this structural bifurcation onto safety dynamics. By explicitly distinguishing between transactional and relational elements across both sides of the employment dyad (employer and employee), the scale operationalizes the cognitive schemas that govern how workers interpret workplace safety policies. A worker who views safety solely through a transactional lens adheres to rules strictly to avoid punitive reprimand or secure extrinsic rewards. Conversely, a worker functioning within an active relational safety contract demonstrates proactive safety participation, intervening to protect coworkers and actively participating in continuous safety improvements because they perceive the organization as fundamentally invested in their life, health, and dignity.

7. Validity

The psychometric validation of the Psychological Contract of Safety Scale involved a rigorous, multistage methodological process to establish robust content, construct, convergent, and discriminant validity.

Content and Face Validity

The development protocol commenced with item pool generation directly rooted in theoretical dimensions identified in psychological contract literature (e.g., Herriot et al., 1997; Millward & Hopkins, 1998; Rousseau, 1990) and occupational safety climate frameworks (Cox & Cox, 1991; Zohar, 1980). A comprehensive panel of subject matter experts—comprising academic organizational psychologists, industrial safety ergonomists, and field-level safety representatives—critically evaluated initial item pools. Items were scrutinized for linguistic clarity, conceptual distinctiveness, psychological realism, and freedom from idiosyncratic jargon. Subsequent qualitative pilot testing was conducted across heterogeneous high-risk employment sectors (N = 99; encompassing 32 registered nurses, 29 commercial construction workers, and 38 meat processing operators), ensuring the items demonstrated broad face validity across vastly divergent operational settings, educational strata, and occupational physical risk profiles.

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity was formally established using exploratory and confirmatory analytic strategies across a large validation sample of healthcare professionals (N = 424). Factor extraction confirmed that items cleanly loaded onto their theoretical transactional and relational dimensions for both employer and employee sub-frameworks, without demonstrating destructive cross-loadings or structural fragmentation. The empirical recovery of these theorized dimensions provides strong statistical evidence that the scale effectively maps onto the theoretical constructs of social exchange in occupational environments.

Convergent and Criterion Validity

The scale demonstrated significant convergent validity when evaluated alongside established organizational and safety constructs. Scores on the relational employer obligation fulfillment subscale exhibited statistically significant positive correlations with validated measures of:

• Perceived Organizational Support (POS): Evaluated via Settoon et al. (1996) and Eisenberger’s frameworks, showing that relational safety fulfillment strongly corresponds to broad institutional benevolence.
• Safety Climate Dimensions: Validated against scales by Zohar (1980) and Hayes et al. (1998; Work Safety Scale), demonstrating high positive covariance with managerial commitment to safety and safety communication.
• Safety Citizenship Behaviors (SCB): Significant associations with proactive organizational citizenship (Hofmann et al., 2003), confirming criterion-related validity wherein higher relational fulfillment correlates with voluntary safety stewardship.

Conversely, perceived non-fulfillment or breach of employer safety obligations correlated significantly with negative organizational outcomes, including elevated psychological distress, turnover intentions, employee burnout, and higher frequencies of self-reported safety shortcuts and workplace near-misses.

8. Reliability

The Psychological Contract of Safety Scale demonstrates exceptional internal consistency across all dimensions. During initial psychometric item analysis, candidate items were evaluated through rigorous diagnostic filtering criteria, including corrected item-total correlations (retaining items exhibiting values ≥ .50), evaluation of squared multiple correlations (R²), and assessment of item skewness and kurtosis indices to prevent range compression.

The final refined subscales exhibited the following internal consistency metrics:

• Employer Obligations Total Scale (21 items): Cronbach’s alpha reached an outstanding α = .98, indicating a highly cohesive, homogenous latent construct.
• Employee Obligations Total Scale (17 items): Maintained high internal consistency, yielding Cronbach’s alpha values consistently exceeding α = .90 across validation testing.
• Subscale Reliabilities: When dissected into specific operational facets, the subscales demonstrated strong reliability parameters:
• Employer Transactional Obligations: α values typically ranging from .89 to .94.
• Employer Relational Obligations: α values typically ranging from .92 to .96.
• Employee Transactional Obligations: α values typically ranging from .86 to .91.
• Employee Relational Obligations: α values typically ranging from .88 to .93.

The extremely high alpha coefficient observed for the Employer Obligations scale (α = .98) reflects the tightly coupled psychological perception of employer duties held by workers. Subsequent split-half reliability calculations and composite reliability indices computed within structural equation models confirmed that the scale retains excellent psychometric stability without introducing excessive participant response fatigue or unneeded cognitive burden.

9. Factor Analysis

The factorial validity of the Psychological Contract of Safety Scale was examined through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) utilizing data from the validation cohort of 424 healthcare employees across hospital and clinical departments.

Pre-Extraction Diagnostics

Prior to statistical extraction, sample adequacy and data factorability were verified. The correlation matrices for both employer and employee item pools displayed substantial collinearity without problematic extreme multicollinearity. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy yielded values well above the recommended .80 threshold (KMO > .92), and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity attained high statistical significance (p < .001), validating the application of factor analytic models.

Extraction and Rotational Structure

Because theoretical assumptions posited that transactional and relational safety obligations within an organization are correlated dimensions of an overarching social exchange relationship, factor extraction was conducted using principal axis factoring or principal components analysis paired with oblique rotation methods (e.g., Promax or Direct Oblimin; Costello & Osborne, 2005; Tabachnick & Fidell, 2001).

• Employer Obligations Item Pool: EFA conducted on the 21 retained employer items extracted a distinct two-factor solution that accounted for the majority of the cumulative item variance. Factor 1 clearly represented Relational Obligations, with high factor loadings (> .60 to .85) across items evaluating mutual trust, managerial empathy, open reporting environments, and sustained organizational care. Factor 2 accounted for Transactional Obligations, capturing items with substantial loadings (> .55 to .80) measuring tangible provision of PPE, formal compliance training, administrative protocols, and statutory enforcement. Cross-loadings between factors remained minimal, validating empirical divergence.
• Employee Obligations Item Pool: Analysis of the 17 employee obligation items similarly confirmed a robust two-factor structure. The primary extracted dimensions clearly demarcated Transactional Employee Obligations (rule adherence, procedural conformity, PPE usage, checklist completion) from Relational Employee Obligations (proactive peer support, mutual safety advocacy, voluntary hazard remediation, safety communication).

Subsequent fit diagnostics confirmed that this dual-factor multidimensional conceptualization aligns with both psychological contract frameworks and empirical safety climate models.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Psychological Contract of Safety Scale
• Acronym: PCSS
• Author: Dr. Arlene Walker (Deakin University)
• Test Type: Psychometric Self-Report Questionnaire
• Construct Assessed: Reciprocal cognitive expectations and perceived fulfillment of occupational safety obligations (Social Exchange Framework)
• Format: 38 items total, structured into two separate operational sections:
  • Employer Obligations: 21 items (Transactional vs. Relational obligations)
  • Employee Obligations: 17 items (Transactional vs. Relational obligations)
• Response Scale: 11-point metric continuum ranging from 0 to 10:
  • 0 = Obligation not at all met
  • 1 – 9 = Intermediate degrees of perceived obligation fulfillment
  • 10 = Obligation completely met
• Scoring Protocol:
  • Items are scored numerically from 0 to 10 based on respondent ratings.
  • No reverse-scored items are included in the standard fulfillment formulation.
  • Subscale scores are generated by calculating either the sum or the arithmetic mean of items corresponding to each dimension: Employer Transactional, Employer Relational, Employee Transactional, and Employee Relational.
  • Composite total scores for Employer Obligations Fulfillment (0–210) and Employee Obligations Fulfillment (0–170) can be compiled, though dimensional evaluation is recommended.
  • Discrepancy / Incongruence scores can be evaluated mathematically to examine perceptual asymmetries in the reciprocal psychological contract dyad.
• Administration Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes.
• Target Population: Adult employees, industrial workers, clinical and healthcare professionals, construction personnel, and organizational leaders across safety-critical domains.
• Language: English

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Publication / Test Year: 2010
• Copyright Holder: Copyright © 2010 National Safety Council and Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
• Original Academic Citation: Walker, A. (2010). Outcomes associated with the psychological contract of safety: Preliminary validation of the Psychological Contract of Safety Scale. Journal of Safety Research, 41(4), 369–377. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2010.06.002
• Access and Usage Permissions: The individual items and measurement apparatus are copyrighted by Elsevier and the National Safety Council. The complete scale is not released under an open-access Creative Commons license. Academic researchers, non-profit institutions, and industrial organizational practitioners seeking to administer, reproduce, adapt, or utilize the Psychological Contract of Safety Scale must obtain formal permission through Elsevier’s RightsLink permission clearance system or request direct written consent from the primary author, Dr. Arlene Walker ([email protected]).
• Licensing Fees: Academic and non-commercial research projects generally qualify for fee-waiver permissions upon formal application, whereas commercial consulting or organizational diagnostic applications may incur licensing and transactional administration fees determined by the publisher.

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13. Items of the Scale