Safety climate in the Ghanaian printing industry

improving a company’s health and safety performance and reducing workplace injury rates” (para. 6). This safety climate is thus concomitant to the style and proficiency of an organisa- tion’s health and safety management. Although the economic and social significance of safety issues are apparent, and research on safety climate, particularly in the developed world, is growing, safety issues in the printing industry of Ghana have received only cursory attention from the scholarly community. Studies conducted have been ad hoc, and impressionistic rather than methodical. Little systematic and empirical research has scrutinised safety climate practices, and there continues to be a gap between practice and recommendations from the research. As Agbenorku et al. [14] and Puplampu and Quartey [21] observed, few empirical investigations have been conducted on Organisational Health Safety (OHS) within the printing industry of Ghana. A thorough review of the literature yielded only two pieces of empirical research within the meta-analysis on OHS. Undeniably, there are missing pieces in the literature [14, 21]; this calls for further empirical work to provide a greater understanding of the health and safety environment within the printing industry of Ghana. Zohar [22] developed the concept of safety climate on the premise that employees’ percep- tion of the organisational environment can be an immediate antecedent to behaviour. In the manufacturing industry, safety climate is described as the collective perception of workers

about the value placed on safety by management as manifested by recent or current events. This is a demonstration of a safety culture in the behaviour and expressed attitude of employ- ees [23]. The concept comes from a bottom-up perceptional approach that measures what workers think about safety culture in their company at a particular moment [24]. Thus, employees’ willingness to take practical action to deal with a problem is based on their perceptions of reality driven by the safety climate. The safety climate is, therefore, a reli- able indicator among a variety of quantitative and qualitative data collection tools to predict workplace injuries [25]. A survey that asks employees how they, and their senior managers and immediate supervisors deal with safety issues, serves as a gauge and provides a focal point for changes to improve safety. Safety climate is a multidimensional concept that includes several scales and a wide range of factors used to characterise individual perceptions of safety at a workplace [26–29]. The lit- erature is replete with several developed safety climate dimensions. While previous studies attempt to explore safety climate factors and ways of improving and measuring them, there is a lack of consensus and little agreement on which dimensions or factors make up the most reli- able [30–35]. As stated by Newaz [30 p739] and supported by other authors, “the lack of a uni- fying theoretical model in this area reflects the state of development of this field, where an

inductive rather than a deductive approach is in operation” [36, 37]. Further, the lack of con- sensus could be attributed to the unique cultural differences among specific industries [38, 39] or that different instruments measure distinctly different safety climate concepts [26, 40]. The print manufacturing industry is one of the riskiest industries in terms of incident and accident rates [41, 42]. Although there is a general agreement to create a safety climate in the industries, few validated tools to measure important elements of a safety climate exist. In this study, we adopted the Safety Climate Scale for Manufacturing Industry (SCSMI) developed by Ghahramani and Khalkhali [43] to measure the safety climate in the print manufacturing industry of Ghana. This paper examines the safety climate with particular emphasis on top management, supervisors and co-workers’ commitment to safety, which is relatively new and untested in the printing industry of Ghana. This research critically evaluates the safety environment within the industry through the application of a perception survey to understand the personal and collective attitudes and patterns of behaviour that define the commitment to an organisation’s PLOS ONE Safety climate in the printing industry PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278100 November 28, 2022 3 / 15