Safety Climate in Project-Based Organizations: Multi-Criteria Analysis

Abstract

Research Question: The aim of this paper is to determine the factors influencing safety climate in different industrial sectors in project-based organizations. Motivation: Systematic research on occupational safety is not so frequent in the Republic of Serbia. The lack of research that deals with safety climate in project-based organizations exploring the attitudes of employees in different industrial sectors is evident. In the research conducted by Milijic et al., (2013) a model for measuring safety climate factors was proposed and the following step is to identify the most important safety climate issues for each industrial sector as a key to fostering better safety performance. Chen et al. (2018a) concluded that engagement at all levels of the company is essential to fostering better safety performances as well as that safety awareness is the most important factor influencing workers' safety efficiency. The authors of the present paper seek those particular factors that adequately describe safety climate in project-based organizations by examining the attitudes of workers in different industrial sectors. Idea: The main idea of this paper is to evaluate and rank safety climate in different industrial sectors and different workplaces considering the following five factors of safety climate: Safety and competence awareness, Occupational safety management commitment, Safety training and tools, Safety practices and procedures and Organizational environment. Data: Safety climate analysis was conducted on a set of data collected as a part of a survey carried out in eleven project-oriented organizations operating in different industrial sectors on the territory of Serbia. Tools: This paper proposes a multi-criteria analysis of the data collected from a national survey using the Entropy-PROMETHEE-GAIA method. Findings: A complete ranking of safety climate in project-oriented organizations based on the opinions of employees in different industrial sectors resulted in Energy as the best-ranked sector. On the other hand, the worst-ranked sector is High-rise construction. The results of the complete ranking of safety climate in project-oriented organizations based on the opinions of employees at different workplaces in different industrial sectors showed that the best-ranked alternatives were manager working places. When it comes to production workers on projects, the most favorable safety climate is in energy workplaces and for non-productive workers, while the most favorable safety climate is on projects in the field of mechanical engineering. Contribution: Adopting the conclusions from the paper can, in practice, improve safety climate along with safety at work in project-based organizations.