Safety climate in the Ghanaian printing industry

RESEARCH ARTICLE Safety climate in the Ghanaian printing industry Samuel Smith EssehID1☯, Lucy Afeafa Ry-KottohID1☯*, Mary Mawufemor Denyo2☯ 1 Department of Publishing Studies, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana, 2 Axiom Consult, Kumasi, Ghana ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. * afeafarykottoh@gmail.com Abstract The concept of safety climate has gained attention from safety experts as one of the most efficient and effective ways to deal with occupational accidents and injuries across indus- tries. This paper explores the safety climate and the effect of employees’ demographic vari- ables on the safety climate perception in the printing industry. We adopted the Safety Climate Scale (SCS) developed by Ghahramani and Khalkhali to measure the safety climate in the print manufacturing industry of Ghana. Our findings, based on all the dimensions in the scale, revealed an unsafe safety climate. Also, there was a correlation between demo- graphic factors (age, gender, experience, and education) and perception of workplace safety climate. The major contribution of this paper is to extend empirical research that pro- vides a greater understanding of the health and safety environment within the printing indus- try of Ghana and the personal and collective attitudes and patterns of behaviour that determine the commitment to organisations’ health and safety practices. These findings are important for managers in the printing industry because they provide evidence about the

current safety climate so that management can take the action to reduce risks and improve performance. To improve the safety climate, we recommend that management and other stakeholders within the printing industry must commit and communicate effectively, embrace safety practices and procedures, and be more accountable and responsible to minimise the effects of a poor safety climate. Introduction Safety climate, the perceived and assumed value placed on safety in an organisation has great potential to reduce workplace injury rates and positively influence safety performance in many business environments. Growing research supports the assertion that as an organisation’s safety climate improves, the organisation’s safety practices improve [1–3]. A safe business cli- mate is, therefore, key in remediating work-related injuries, ill health and minimising work- hazards. There is growing empirical evidence, however, that suggests that occupational safety challenges are severe in the printing industry: from manual handling injuries, slip and trip injuries, to machinery injuries [4, 5]. The printing industry, classified as the sixth high-risk PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278100 November 28, 2022 1 / 15 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Esseh SS, Ry-Kottoh LA, Denyo MM (2022) Safety climate in the Ghanaian printing industry. PLoS ONE 17(11): e0278100. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278100 Editor: Sebsibe Tadesse, Ethiopian Public Health Institute, ETHIOPIA Received: October 27, 2021

Accepted: November 10, 2022 Published: November 28, 2022 Copyright: © 2022 Esseh et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are available at: http://ir.knust.edu.gh/handle/ 123456789/15941. Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: The authors have declared no competing interests.