Safety climate among contractors’ organizations

Abstract

Understanding the safety climate of the contractor‟s organization with regard to safety and risk in the workplace will provide an overview of the current safety culture of that organization. The perceptions and attitudes of the workforce are the important factors in assessing the safety needs in order to facilitate workplace safety improvement. Safety performance may fail if the organization does not take into account these current attitudes and perceptions. The aim of this study is to examine the factors and assessment of safety climate in the contractors‟ organizations. This study is carried out through questionnaire survey to gauge employee attitudes and perceptions using several attitudes dimensions. The full employee attitude survey questionnaire was divided into two sections which consists of 49 statements. The responses of this study were quite encouraging with 60% participants responded. However, only 38 valid sets of questionnaires were subjected to analysis. The findings indicated that there were many factors and indicators of safety climate that had been found from the literature review. In fact, the numbers of factors required in the safety climate measurements, or which factors were the most effective were always subjected to argument. From the review of safety climate factors, the most frequently measured dimensions were related to management, safety systems and risk, followed by work pressure, competence and rules or procedures. On the assessment of the contractors‟ safety climate, the total average scores for all dimensions were in levels of satisfaction with a score ranging from 6.48 to 8.04. Also, all the safety climate dimensions showed scores in the satisfactory values with a score above six (6) for the system interfaces of the contractor organizations using the safety climate matrix. Hence, the contractor‟s organizations surveyed had the positive safety climate toward safety in their workplace.