The Influence of Safety Culture on Reducing Workplace Accidents in Industrial Settings
Keywords:
Safety culture, occupational accidents, industrial safety, organizational commitment, employee involvement, occupational health and safety, well-being at work.Abstract
The issue of safe industrial environment is an increasingly relevant aspect: the risk of an accident on working places can bring upon serious damage to human health and penalize the efficiency of any organization. The present investigation brings to light the influence of safety culture in reducing work place accidents through the share of common set of values, beliefs, attitudes and behavior directed at ensuring high occupational safety among the staff at all levels of the organization. A good safety culture is built on understanding, responsibility, and control measures that prevent accidents from occurring. The importance of management commitment, employee involvement, good communication and continuing training as the bases of a good safety culture are emphasized in the study. The empirical evidence, drawn from over a century of experience in different commercial sectors, is that accident rates are far lower in sectors which develop strong safety cultures resulting in lower financial costs and reduced occupational costs as well as lower anxiety and stress and higher morale of their employees. The study concludes with “embedding safety culture in corporate strategy does not only ensure compliance to legislation, but it is also a proactive means to create a safer and sustainable workplace.
Downloads
References
Cooper, M. D. (2000). Towards a model of safety culture. Safety Science, 36(2), 111-136.
Reason, J. (1997). Managing the Risks of Organizational Accidents. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Guldenmund, F. W. (2000). The nature of safety culture: A review of theory and research. Safety Science, 34(1-3), 215-257.
Clarke, S. (2006). The relationship between safety climate and safety performance: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 11(4), 315-327.
Mearns, K., Whitaker, S. M., & Flin, R. (2003). Safety climate, safety management practice and safety performance in offshore environments. Safety Science, 41(8), 641-680.
Zohar, D. (2002). Modifying supervisory practices to improve subunit safety: A leadership-based intervention model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(1), 156-163.
Neal, A., & Griffin, M. A. (2006). A study of the lagged relationships among safety climate, safety motivation, safety behavior, and accidents at the individual and group levels. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91(4), 946-953.
Fernandez-Muniz, B., Montes-Peon, J. M., & Vazquez-Ordas, C. J. (2007). Safety management system: Development and validation of a multidimensional scale. Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, 20(1), 52-68.
Choudhry, R. M., Fang, D., & Mohamed, S. (2007). Developing a model of construction safety culture. Journal of Management in Engineering, 23(4), 207-212.
Hopkins, A. (2006). Studying organizational cultures and their effects on safety. Safety Science, 44(10), 875-889.
Antonsen, S. (2009). Safety culture: Theory, method and improvement. Safety Science, 47(7), 912-922.
HSE (2005). A review of safety culture and safety climate literature for the development of the safety culture inspection toolkit. Health and Safety Executive, UK.
Flin, R., Mearns, K., O’Connor, P., & Bryden, R. (2000). Measuring safety climate: Identifying the common features. Safety Science, 34(1-3), 177-192.
Hale, A. R. (2000). Culture’s confusions. Safety Science, 34(1-3), 1-14.
Zohar, D., & Luria, G. (2005). A multilevel model of safety climate: Cross-level relationships between organization and group-level climates. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(4), 616-628.
Hallowell, M. R., & Gambatese, J. A. (2009). Activity-based safety risk quantification for concrete formwork construction. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 135(10), 990-998.
Christian, M. S., Bradley, J. C., Wallace, J. C., & Burke, M. J. (2009). Workplace safety: A meta-analysis of the roles of person and situation factors. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(5), 1103-1127.
Wu, T. C., Chen, C. H., & Li, C. C. (2008). A correlation among safety leadership, safety climate and safety performance. Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, 21(3), 307-318.
Grote, G. (2007). Understanding and assessing safety culture through the lens of organizational management of uncertainty. Safety Science, 45(6), 637-652.
Hofmann, D. A., & Morgeson, F. P. (1999). Safety-related behavior as a social exchange: The role of perceived organizational support and leader–member exchange. Journal of Applied Psychology, 84(2), 286-296.
Pidgeon, N. (1998). Safety culture: Key theoretical issues. Work & Stress, 12(3), 202-216.
Mullen, J. (2004). Investigating factors that influence individual safety behavior at work. Journal of Safety Research, 35(3), 275-285.
Mohamed, S. (2002). Safety climate in construction site environments. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 128(5), 375-384.
Sawacha, E., Naoum, S., & Fong, D. (1999). Factors affecting safety performance on construction sites. International Journal of Project Management, 17(5), 309-315.
Gadd, S., & Collins, A. M. (2002). Safety culture: A review of the literature. HSE Research Report 367.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
All papers should be submitted electronically. All submitted manuscripts must be original work that is not under submission at another journal or under consideration for publication in another form, such as a monograph or chapter of a book. Authors of submitted papers are obligated not to submit their paper for publication elsewhere until an editorial decision is rendered on their submission. Further, authors of accepted papers are prohibited from publishing the results in other publications that appear before the paper is published in the Journal unless they receive approval for doing so from the Editor-In-Chief.
IJISAE open access articles are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This license lets the audience to give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made and if they remix, transform, or build upon the material, they must distribute contributions under the same license as the original.
