Safety Culture Behaviour in Electronics Manufacturing Sector (EMS) in Malaysia: The Case of Flextronics

Abstract

The prevention of work-related injury and illness is of crucial importance to employees, industry and society as a whole. Corporate safety culture is now generally accepted as having a strong influence over workplace accidents and injuries. After implementation of Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) in the organization, there have been an improvement in term of safety in the workplace. However, there are still some cases of accident being reported even after the organizations’ management provided training, introducing stricter rules and regulation regarding safety, and provides proper equipment to employee. Hence, the study is carried out in order to examine the effect of employees’ attitude and subjective norm toward safety culture behaviour in organization. The study was conducted in manufacturing service industry in Malaysia, and data collection was done at Flextronics Penang Sdn Bhd, a company in the northern part of Malaysia. Data were collected through 196 survey questionnaires distributed to operators (90 respondents), technician (52 respondents) and engineer (27 respondents) in Flextronics Penang Sdn Bhd. The results showed that safety culture behaviour is significantly influenced by employee's attitude and subjective norm. Based on the findings, several recommendations are being put forward in order to improve the safety culture behaviour among employees in the organization. For future research in the same area, it is being recommended to include management commitment, leadership, safety education, and training under scrutiny in order to understand its relationship with safety culture behaviour among employees.