Multicriteria analysis of safety climate measurements at workplaces in production industries in Serbia

•We measured some safety climate indicators in the Serbian production companies.•We investigated the influence of demographic parameters on occupational safety issues.•The statistical data analysis was based on MCDA and GLM methodologies.•The safety climate perception can be measured reliably by the presented questionnaire.

This paper presents the results of measuring certain safety climate indicators in Serbian production companies. As a result of these investigations, which have already been conducted by this group of authors, a 21-item questionnaire was developed in 2010. In this research, we developed a methodological framework to measure the safety climate in Serbian companies. The investigation was carried out in companies that were engaged in different industrial sectors. The aim was to determine the initial degree of developing the safety climate in every industrial sector, i.e. to compare and rank them. The following demographic factors were used for this purpose: types of industry, the number of employees in the company, the position in the organizational structure of the firm, age groups, employees with a different length of work experience, employees' gender, those who have or have not been involved in an occupational accident and the level of employees' education. Our analysis defined the significance of every demographic subgroup based on the results obtained by measuring the safety climate in all organizations. However, taking into consideration a large number of subgroups, the starting hypotheses were proposed only for the two most important ones: the type of organization does have an influence on safety climate indicators – hypothesis H1 and the position of the employee in the firm does have important influence on safety climate indicators – hypothesis H2. Both hypotheses were confirmed on the base of the results of further analyses.Relevance to industryThe questionnaire used in this paper provides the evaluation of safety climate in production companies, and the applied multicriteria methodology provides the comparative analysis of safety climate among the companies and different industries. It is suitable for research purposes as well as for practical use.