Safety climate as a driver of change of positive safety culture in a Malaysian manufacturing plant

Abstract

Background: It has been widely agreed that the positive changes in safety climate score over a period of time would further improve the underlying elements of organisational safety culture. Objective: Therefore, this study attempts to examine changes on employee perception on safety climate over a period of time. Design: A quantitative approach, using a longitudinal panel design was employed. This research design is appropriate when research questions and hypotheses are effected by how things vary over time. Method: Participants recruited for this study were production workers in one of A Malaysian electric and electronic manufacturing plant. Approval has been granted by the senior management that survey could be conducted among their production workers in two departments at two times period (Time 1 and Time 2). A safety climate survey that has been developed by Cheyne, A., Cox,S., Oliver, A., Tomas, J.M., (1998) was used as the instrument of this study. The response rate was 83% (N=330) in Time 1 and 98% (N=402) in Time 2. Data has been analyzed using a one-way between-groups multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). Results: There was a statistically significant difference in safety climate dimensions when the data from Time 1 were compared to the data in Time 2, with an overall Pillai‟s trace of .602 (df = 696); partial eta squared = 0.602. The mean scores indicated that Time 2 reported slightly higher levels on all Safety Climate dimensions; i.e., Management Action (M= 33.40, SD = 2.65), Management Attitude (M= 25.31, SD = 2.32) and Safety Versus Production (M= 16.32, SD = 2.60) compared to Time 1. Conclusion: The significant changes on all safety climate dimensions in Time 2 suggest that there were changes in the underlying safety culture in this plant. An implication of this finding is the possibility that the changes in the safety climate suggest that employees viewed or perceived safety climate as important for them to better understand safety in the workplace. They believe that their workplace provides such a supportive safe working environment. This finding will be contributes to the Malaysian national agenda in moving towards a preventative culture by the year 2016. However, this study is limited to one single plant/industrial sector. Therefore, more research on safety climate and safety culture should be conducted in all industrial settings in Malaysia.