Impact of Occupational Safety and Health on Employees’ Performance at Zanzibar Government Printing Press in Unguja-Zanzibar

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to assess the Impact of Occupational Safety and Health on Employees’ Performance at Zanzibar Government Printing Press (ZGPP) in Unguja. The specific objectives of this study were to assess how work environment affects employees’ performance at the ZGPP, to examine how precautionary measures of occupational health may improve employees’ performance and to assess how Occupational Health hampers employees’ performance at the ZGPP. The study adopted descriptive study design, while self-administered questionnaires were used to collect data from the respondents. This study covered the staff of Zanzibar Government Printing Press (ZGPP) who were simple randomly selected from a sample frame of 127. A total of 106 respondents were selected for the study. Data was analyzed using Statistical Packages for Social Science (SPSS) to capture the impact of Occupational Safety and Health on Employees’ Performance at ZGPP and regression model was used for data processing and analysis of the relationship between the variables. The findings of the study showed that, just more than half (63.4%) of the respondents were male, the study also revealed that, about 44.6% of the respondents lacked knowledge of OSH. However, liner regression analysis was done to establish the relationship between the independent and dependent variables. The study discovered that, variable of working condition had strong relationship (β = 0.468, t = 5.273, p < 0.05) on employees’ performance with the significance level of p < 0.05. The study also revealed that, Occupational Health had significant effect (β = 0.246, t = 2.521, p < 0.05) on employees’ performance at ZGPP. Additionally, it was also discovered that, there was no work place precautionary measures addressed (β = 0.087, t = 0.868, p > 0.05) on employees’ performance. Although these findings showed that work place precautionary measure had negative effect on employees’ performance at ZGPP. Thus, it was recommended that, ZGPP should focus more on the protection and prevention of OSH, improve occupational health in terms of training of OSH, enforcement of regulation and policy of OSH continuously towards employees’ performance. As the study design was descriptive in nature and could not establish causality and temporality, an in-depth longitudinal follow up study would be recommended to yield better association.