Examining The Influence of Lecturer’s Safety Leadership Towards Student’s Lab Safety Behaviour in Polytechnic Port Dickson

Abstract

The need to take safety as the underlying core aspects of all business operations and services which includes educational institutions becoming a concern especially when few catastrophic fire tragedies occurred lately took lives of young children mercilessly. This study mainly examines the influence of lecturer’s safety leadership towards safety behavior among engineering students of Polytechnic Port Dickson.  The aspects of safety rely not only on installing expensive equipment and alarms but also in prevention method through awareness and attitude of building occupants. Educational institutions such as polytechnics have many engineering laboratories that need to be operated by inexperienced students with lecturer’s guidance. Therefore they are exposed to various hazards both inside and outside of laboratory. Just as the saying goes   “prevention is better than cure” this study helps to determine what other methods that lecturers can use to create safety behavior among students so that they can well manage the existing hazard in lab. This instilled safety behavior can then be brought into their far more hazardous environment during their working life in future.  Safety leadership of lecturer is looked into three attributes which are safety concern, safety motivation and safety policy. These three attributes contributes as independent variables. Students’ safety behavior consists of two dependent variables which are safety compliance and safety participation. The influence of each of these two attributes (safety compliance and safety participations) towards safety leadership attributes is studied using a total of 345 questionnaires which were distributed to mechanical, electrical and civil department of Polytechnic Port Dickson. Correlation and Multiple Regression analysis were used to in Statistical Package for Social Sciences, (SPSS) to analyze the outcome of raw data.  Safety compliance shows significant relationship with all three safety leadership attributes (safety concern, safety motivation, and safety policy).The highest influence towards safety compliance of students goes to safety policy, followed by safety concern and the least is safety motivation. As with safety participation, the highest influence goes to safety concern, safety motivation and the least is safety policy. Safety component is the most essential in determining safety behavior as it has been consistently explaining the variance in both dimensions of safety behavior.