Ray
Unless a climate survey is designed in such a way that its concurrent and predictive validity have been measured accurately with procedures that can be replicated independently, users are unavoidably going to pass on errors of measurment in any judgments they use in making decisions, without awareness of the lack of validity. The details of the invalid inferences depend on the specific situation and are by no means limited to survey data, since they are as likely to generate problems about performance managment - failure to work to standard or to communciate with others fairly - as about safety management. In a safety climate survey, data might for example show patterns of 'unsafe behavioir' which may be (invalidly) attributed by first line managers or senior management to employees, which are actually due to failures in job design, in lack of instructions and of appropriate training, or to overwork or fatigue or even sheer bad luck for which employees have no responsbility. The significanceof invalid inference by management in such situations is multiplied where there are grounds for interpreting their judgments in terms of any form of indirect discrimination.
The reseach evidence is about invalid attributions within the design of safety climate surveys, that go back to the 1980s and 1990s; the legal interpretation is based on my own training in employment law as well as safegty law.. If you want relevant research references from journals such as Safety Science, the Journal of Occupational and Organsiational Psychology, Personnel Psychology , Adminisgtrative Management Quarterly, the Academy of Management Review and the Journal of Applied Psychology and others; Dom Cooper, C Psychol, CFIOSH, has written some of the best articles. If you want specific references, email me and I can drwa up a list.
I was discussing this issue with a EHS manager only this week....The context is important to the point at issue. It's a couple of years since I did an ergonomic risk assessment in the company and since then there have been changes in personnel at senior level: general manager, HR manager, production manager all gone. With the arrival of a new general manager, he asked me to talk through his preparation for his initial interview with the guy, starting with his perceptions of chronic refusals by senior managers to contribute constructively to OSH, over the 4 year period he's been withe company.
Our conversation brought out that this failure was associated with the behaviour of the departed HR manager (whose role has been partly replaced by a Talent Manager) who habitually held team leaders and managers 'accountable' for failures without investing any money in training them for their responsitibities. An unqualified HR manager, she had over more than a decade 'trained' other managers by example and precept that harassment and bullying were the dominant cultural norms; she had created a culture in which managers had developed habits of avoiding unpalatable issues and simply failing to gather relevant data necessary to make decisions. Habitually, she and they made decisions about safety and performance management that were not based on veritiable data and were open, almost daily to challenges of harassment and even of constructive dismissal.
As a converntionally qualified EHS manager, the client was not familar with the elements of Employment law, and remains unsure who in his company is in a position to advise the general manager on performance management and relevant areas of employment law. Being a Fellow of the CIPD as well as CMIOSH, I've been keeping abreast of relevant ereas of laws and regs in both areas for over a couple of decades in order to flag them up when relevant, especially as there is no cap on the compensation for claims in the field of discrimination.
There have been insstancs of litigation about invalid uses of measurement data about people in the UK in which employers found themselves deeply out of pocket although there's much less ambiguity about the issues now that a couple of decades ago.