Review of strategies to improve workplace safety through ethical climates

Abstract

Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) is an important aspect in every type of organisations. Healthy workers are an important asset to the organisation and safety issues causes various losses to the organisation. Therefore, it is vital to formulate strategies to improve the occupational health and safety in every type of organisations. It has been found out that 80% of the workplace accidents are due to employee behaviours. Moreover, according to past researches, ethical climate of the organisation affects the individual employee behaviours. Ethical climate refers to the shared perceptions of organisational members regarding what is considered correct behaviour in the organisation and how the organisation deals with ethical issues. Ethical climate guides the employees to determine what is considered right and wrong behaviour at work. Therefore, it is much clear that there is a strong link between ethical climates and the workplace safety. Thus, this study discusses how the ethical climates affect the employees’ work place safety behaviours and ultimately on the occupational health and safety. The literature review shows that among the nine types of ethical climates, principal-local climates and benevolent- local climates have the highest positive effect on workplace safety behaviours. Therefore, the organisations should encourage these types of ethical climates in their organisations and can enhance the safety performance by aligning their safety initiatives with ethical climates.