An Investigation of Safety Training and Safety Outcome in a Manufacturing Plant

Abstract

Safety training is considered as one of safety intervention that is believed to be an antecedent of safety outcome within organization. The rapid advancement in safety management field has also raised many questions mainly to the roles of safety training in organizations safety. Nevertheless, to date far too little discussions have been made to empirically study the impact of safety training and its influence to safety outcome in the workplace. Therefore, the purpose of this longitudinal study is two-fold, first it attempts to examine the level of safety training impacts over time, and secondly it seeks to examine the relationship between safety training and safety outcome (workplace accidents) over time. Quantitative approach using longitudinal design is employed for the purpose of data collection. The results were based on two data collection carried out in one of Malaysian manufacturing plant in 2008 and 2009. The response rate was 83% (N=330) in 2008 and 98% (N=402) in 2009. Overall, the current study has gone some way towards enhancing our understanding of safety training impacts particularly with regard to the improvement of safety outcome. However, this study has thrown up a number of questions in need to further investigation. The need for further research to evaluate the effectiveness of a specific training intervention in reducing particular types of injury and its relation to safety culture over time in various industries is prevailing to be crucial.