Assessing leadership and employee safety participation in managing health and safety: A case study of K-refinery and petrochemical companies (K-RPC)

Abstract

The ever increasing need for energy resources creates complex health and safety challenges in petroleum and petrochemical companies and human participation is crucial to the management of health and safety particularly in K-Refinery and Petrochemical companies (K-RPC). The research set out to differentiate management safety performance behaviour into two different types, assess the impact of employee and management safety participation on overall safety performance and to evaluate the impact of employees’ safety knowledge/perception on compliant behaviour in K-RPC. Methods employed in the assessment are the Mann Whitney U Test, Correlation Analysis and descriptive statistics. The results suggested that there is no difference in mean ranking between management and employees regarding the level of management commitment, indicating a high level of participation. A significant negative correlation was found between employees’ safety knowledge and safety compliant behaviour, which implies a low practical application of safety knowledge gained through training. Therefore, though management participation in safety issues in K-RPC is perceived to be high, this commitment did not impact on the overall levels of safety performance in K-RPC. Hence, the manner in which participation in work-related safety is exhibited has an overwhelming impact on safety performance. When participation takes the form of directives rather than direct and true active involvement during work operations, the empowering safety leadership which is a fundamental drive to the attainment of an incident-free work will be missing.