Relationships between safety climate and safety participation in the petroleum industry: A structural equation modeling approach

Safety participation is a higher-order concept for safety improvement. The dynamic hazards in refinery plants make safety participation one of the significant factors for the plants' safety culture, with safety climate being the foundation of this relation. The present study aimed to probe into the influence of safety climate on safety participation and also investigate as to whether safety knowledge and attitude mediate between the relation of safety climate and safety participation in the context of refinery plants. To this end, the five-point Likert scale questionnaires that included safety participation, knowledge and attitude scales besides safety climate variables were utilized for data collection in two refinery plants in west coast of peninsular Malaysia. A pilot study was applied for clarity of the items to a group of employees (n = 30) at a petroleum refinery plant; the results showed that the internal reliability of the domains ranged between 0.71 and 0.89. Total number of the returned valid questionnaires was 111, and the response rate was 55.5%. Partial Least Squares (PLS-SEM) as a structural equation modeling method was used to test the objectives of the study. The results of structural equation modeling confirmed the safety climate's positive effect on the employees' plant safety participation. It was also revealed that safety knowledge and attitude fully mediated between the relation of safety climate and safety participation in the context of studied refinery plants. The findings of this study could have significant theoretical and practical implications for the employers and employees' safety participation.