Safety climate in the Ghanaian printing industry

Demographic characteristics and safety climate As already indicated, it is important to investigate the potential relationship between moderat- ing variables and safety climate. In this section, we report on potential moderating factors on demographic variables–age, gender, education, experience and size of organisation–concern- ing perceived safety climate. Gender and perception of workplace safety Hypothesis 1. There is a relationship between gender and individual perception of the workplace safety climate. In testing the hypothesis on gender and safety climate, an independent-sample t-test con- ducted to compare male safety climate scores with female safety climate scores found a signifi- cant difference in the scores for males (M = 2.6, SD = 0.70) and females (M = 2.3, SD = 0.65) safety climate perception; t (170) = 2.42, p = 0.16. These results suggest gender influences safety climate perception. Specifically, our results suggest females perceive the climate as more nega- tive compared to males, even though they both recorded a negative perception score on the Safety Climate Scale. Work experience and perception of workplace safety Hypothesis 2: There is a relationship between years of work experience and perception of the workplace environment On work experience, the data showed a statistically significant difference in the score of less experienced workers (M = 2.47, SD = 0.633) and more experienced workers (M = 2.75, SD = 0.79) safety climate perception; t (170) = -2.58, p = 0.10). This shows that experienced

employees (more than 5 years of working experience) perceive the work environment as safer compared with less experienced employees (not more than 5 years of working experience). This confirms Gyekye and Salminen’s [59] work that found that workers less experienced were the “least enthusiastic” about the safety climate in their organisation. This observed relation- ship between years of workplace experience and safety perception could be because of the con- cept of familiarity and perception of hazards [59]. That is when people become familiar with several aspects of their environment, their perception level of hazards turns to diminish [60] and known risks are more acceptable, as though they do not exist. Age and perception of workplace safety Hypothesis 3: There is a relationship between age and individual perception of the workplace climate. The result shows a statistically significant difference, t (170) = 2.754, p = .007, between the perception of younger employees 35-year-olds and below, (M = 2.6851, .66622), and older Table 6. Overall mean score. Safety Climate N Valid 172 Missing 0 Mean 2.5844 Std. Deviation .70336 Variance .039 Cronbach’s Alpha (reliability) .88 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278100.t006 PLOS ONE Safety climate in the printing industry PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278100 November 28, 2022 10 / 15