Ergonomic behavioral and worker's safety perception in Khuzestan Petrochemical Company

An effective safety management requires paying attention to human factors. One of the most important methods for achievement to accident prevention is using safety climate or safety culture. Moreover, some studies suggest that in most organizations behavior contributes to 86-96% of all injuries. This cross-sectional study was performed on the functional units’ workers of Khuzestan Petrochemical Company, in 2010. Data collection tools were safety climate questionnaire that has been presented by Kumar et al. (2009), Ergonomic Behavior Sampling and collected data was analyzed by SPSS 16. With reference to the results of a pilot study, a sample of 1147 was determined for Behavior Sampling. The numbers of returned valid questionnaires were 134 out of 151 and response rate was %88.74. Questionnaire reliability assessed by Cronbach’s Alpha, was 0.928. Results indicated, management commitment and actions for safety, workers’ knowledge and compliance to safety, and workers’ attitudes towards safety, are those safety climate factors which have obtained the highest correlation coefficient with ergonomic behaviors and as predictors on multi-variants linear regression model for ergonomic behavior forecasting. Results showed the importance of decreasing number of workers with negative safety climate. Also, results obligate paying attention to workers’ ergonomic behaviors in the workplace and their promotion.