SAFETY CLIMATE AND SAFETY SYSTEMS FACTORS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP WITH ORGANISATIONAL ATTRIBUTES AND DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS OF EMPLOYEES IN MAJOR ACCIDENT HAZARDOUS INDUSTRIES IN KARNATAKA STATE, INDIA

Narayanappa Thimmarayappa Vijalapura

doi:10.3759/joise.v6i1.1431

Abstract

The present work evaluates the existing critical safety climate and safety system components in the Major Hazardous Industries in Karnataka state, India and establishes the quantitative relationship between them with the organisational and demographic characteristics using a Questionnaire method (containing 81 questions of various safety climate parameters and 53 questions of various safety engineering system parameters among 1029 employees in 22 major hazardous industries in Karnataka). A research instrument using 5-point Likert scale is developed and the collected data was subjected to Exploratory Factor Analysis, which resulted in 13 factors in case of safety climate and 6 factors in case of safety engineering systems whose Eigen values are more than 1 and weighs more than 0.4. The status of safety climate and safety engineering systems of MHIs is studied based on the overall grand mean of the safety climate and safety engineering system scores of all the respondents. The high-level safety climate is reported 49.9% and the low-level safety climate reported is 50.1%. The level of safety engineering systems reported as low constituted 45.9% and as high constituted 54.1%. Furthermore, detailed analysis is conducted for the status of Safety climate and safety systems with respect to Industrial Attributes like Type of Industrial Sector, Cost of the Project, Size of the Industry, Nature of hazard and hazardous substance used and Demographical characteristics of employees such as Age, Gender, Designation, Experience, Qualification, Employment category, and their significance levels are evaluated. Moreover, the relationship between safety climate and safety engineering systems is determined. It is found that low safety engineering systems results in low safety climate for 84.70% of cases. Similarly, higher safety systems result in high safety climate for 79.20% of the cases. Thus, the association between two attributes are statistically significant at 5% significance level. Keywords: Safety Climate, Safety systems, Management commitment towards safety, Safety Leadership, Training and Development, Workers Involvement, Accidents, Injury Rates.