Examining Safety Culture among University Employees in the Klang Valley

Abstract

Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH) Malaysia reported that accident and fatality rate are anticipating to rise constantly over next few years. Physical, psychological and social hazards are the factors that cause occupational accidents and illness, subsequently jeopardised workers’ health and safety. There are extensive occupational health and safety studies conducted in various sectors, but it is less focused on the public sector, particularly public university. Therefore, this paper intends to examine the factors impact safety culture, which involve attitude and practice among public sector’s workers particularly in public university. The study employed quantitative approach specifically mail questionnaire were utilised as the main instrument to collect the information. The data were analysed using Statistical Package for Social Science version 25. In anticipation to investigate association between physical, psychological and social hazards with safety culture, Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient was deployed. Besides that, to scrutinise relationship among variables, ordinal logistic regression analysis was performed. The study finds that only psychological hazards has significant correlation with attitude (?=.272). Further examination on the relationship between variables, the study discovers that only psychological factors have significant influence on practice (p=.002, OD=7.264). This study has exposed empirical relationship between physical hazards, psychological hazards and social hazards factors with safety culture. The university management must diligently address these factors as the exposure to these hazards can cause occupational diseases and work accidents.