SAFETY CLIMATE: The Derived Importance of Personal vs. Situational Factors in Mining

摘要

Because other studies have already conveyed the significant positive relationship between safety climate and safety behavior (e.g., Guldenmund, 2000; Wiegmann et al., 2002; Zohar, 1980), it was important to advance the current thinking and further characterize the impact of these indicators to provide support to mine organizations in tailoring future interventions. These results show the impact that situational and personal safety climate factors can have on worker safety behavior in a high-risk industry. More importantly, what this study contributes to the literature is that we now have empirically derived, demonstrated weights for commonly applied constructs when stacked against each other. Importantly, this study advances the findings and recommendations of previous studies that have found that, in the absence of empirical data to lean on, OHSMS resource allocations are often made based on feeling or intuition (Robson et al., 2007). By empirically exploring the ranked importance of situational and personal constructs, this study is moving the pendulum in the right direction so that practitioners can prioritize actions and make decisions based on science rather than solely relying on former experience to achieve desired results.