Safety communication in mining companies: Differences across organizational structure

Abstract

For mining processes to operate safely, information about safety is crucial. Numerous authors pay attention to fostering a good safety climate without paying attention to safety communication across organizational structure, which motivates this survey. Accordingly, this paper aims to check the hypothesis whether there is a difference between the attitudes of managers, operators, and auxiliary workers in the mining industry regarding safety communication, since differences on their attitudes about safety communication issues have potential to cause safety performance. A survey of 123 respondents working in different positions in Serbian mining companies, which have evaluated the importance of communication as well as the current state regarding the quality of communication in their organizations, was conducted. After evaluating the data and conducting descriptive statistics, followed by the Mann-Whitney test, it was determined that there are no statistically significant differences in the attitudes of managers, operators, and support staff toward safety communication. This indicates that issues with an organization's safety performance are not brought on by the differences on safety attitudes at different hierarchical levels. Proposal for the future research is to examine other possible causes, such as cognitive biases in risk perception, safety training and education and similar, and to use larger sample that may confirm our hypothesis.