Safety Climate In The Workplace

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The concerns about workers health and safety at workplace were raised in the literature as early as in the 18th century. Engels (1845) was the first one who attributed physical environments to be the cause of workers physical and psychological health problems. Consequently Marx (1867) raised his voice against the horrendous exploitation of employees at workplace. Munsterberg (1914) was actually the one who discussed the industrial accidents and the need for a safer workplace in his book “Psychology and Industrial Efficiency.”
Transformational leadership is an individual’s undertaking, performed mutually to bring the creativity and enthusiasm in the work place (Shin & Zhou, 2003). Transformational leadership plays a key role in the organizational

Lee (1995) has indicated that safety attitudes are one of the basic components of safety climate (Cheyne et al., 2007); others are leadership styles, communication, employee commitment (Harvey et al., 2010), safety management (Cox and Flin, 2007) and safety knowledge sharing (Chang, Haung, Chiang, Hsu, and Chang, 2011). Pidgeon (1991) has identified three major determinants of safety climate: (1) norms and rules for hazards handling; (2) positive safety attitudes; and (3) reflexivity (Cheyne et al., 2007).

In organizational safety climate employees share meanings about safety as well as collective commitment to safety (Mearns et al., 2007) and share hazards related information (Pidgeon 2007). Safety climate arises from a combination of different situational factors (Mearns et al., 2010). Safety climate cannot be established within an organization without safety knowledge as International Atomic energy Authority (1991) propose that attention to satisfy involves safety knowledge through training, self-education; instruction; responsibility (Harvey et al.,

Pakistan is 10th largest country in the world and because of inadequate safety conditions and lack of safety procedures two hazardous events happened in Pakistan on September 2012 killing more than 250 people and injuring many others because of fire in Karachi garments factory and in Lahore shoe factory. International Labor Organization also declared that safety conditions in Pakistani industries are inadequate.

In Pakistan organizations are least concerned about ensuring adequate level of occupational safety. The objective of present study is to test the effectiveness of transformational leadership and safety knowledge on organizational safety climate and to investigate the role of safety attitude as a mediator of transformational leadership and safety outcome relationship.
The significance of study is that this research will direct the attention of authorities towards safety in Pakistan and explore how safety climate is affected by a number of socio-demographic factors and within an organization. Moreover this study will help to introduce different safety processes for manufacturing industries as it examines the impact of leadership style on safety climate of the organization in hazardous domain. This relationship will be more effective if the factor of safety attitude positively mediates the transformational leadership style-safety climate