Boustras, Georgios

Management of health and safety in micro-enterprises (less than 10 employees) is a critical issue due to the relatively high level of injuries in such firms. It is also an under-researched area in the international safety literature. The present paper is based on a nationwide survey with the cooperation of the relevant health and safety enforcement authority among micro-firms in several economic sectors. Micro-enterprises comprise a major percentage (95.4%) of business firms in a small economy like Cyprus. The survey examined the perceptions and work attitudes of workers and their relationship with safety performance of the particular firms.This paper presents the results related to the perceptions of employees. A previous paper presented the results focusing on employers. Information was collected on their demographic characteristics and major influencing factors of safety performance like employee participation in safety decisions and safety training. The safety performance measure, an index comprising several safety performance aspects was assessed by the health and safety (labour) inspectors, in order to overcome potential problems of common method bias when all data are obtained from the same group of respondents.The findings suggest that safety performance has a positive and statistically significant correlation with safety training provided by the firm. It has also a positive and statistically significant association with the safety information available to employees and with the perceived safety conditions. The effect of the participation of workers in safety decisions and their organizational commitment, although significantly correlated with safety performance as individual variables, are not statistically significant after controlling for the effect of the other variables mentioned above. The results show the important relationship between safety training and other good practices (like provision of information and improved safety conditions) on safety performance in micro-firms.

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the association of organizational health and safety policies and procedures (OHSPs) and safety perceptions of employees as reflected in safety climate with safety performance. Furthermore the impact of OHSP on work attitudes like job satisfaction and job commitment is also considered. Employee safety policies are considered within the context of a broader policy of corporate social responsibility. The study examines the need for formulation of a proactive safety strategy and its implementation. The research context is Cyprus, a small peripheral European country, which has a service-based, small firm dominated economy. Such an environment presents special problems and barriers in the formulation and implementation of safety policies and procedures and offers an interesting and so far relatively under-researched context for testing relationships between policies and safety outcomes. The results of this study illustrate that OHSP, safety climate, and organizational commitment have a statistically significant association with safety performance.