Determinants of employees' safety behaviours in container terminal operations in Taiwan

Abstract

Container terminals are important interfaces between sea and land transportation. However, container terminal operations involve different types of dangerous and risky activities, such as container loading and discharging, lashing, yard operations, tallying and truck operations. Safety and accident prevention are perennial concerns of container terminal operators. Despite previous studies that have demonstrated the importance of an organisational safety climate and how it affects employees' safety behaviours in shipping and container terminal operations, it seems that a limited number of prior studies has considered the impact of leader-member exchange (LMX) on employees' safety behaviours. Drawing on social exchange theory, LMX refers to the reciprocal exchanges between a leader and a member built on obligations, respect, and trust. This thesis proposes that the relationship between employees and supervisors and safety climate will affect employee's organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB) and safety behaviour in container terminal operations. In addition, this study considers individual factors such as emotional intelligence (EI) and job stress in the model of determinants of safety behaviour. Hence, the objective of this study is to examine the relationships between LMX, safety climate, emotional intelligence, job stress, OCB, and safety behaviour in the context of container terminal operations. Exploratory and confirmatory approaches using a structural equation modelling were conducted. Data were collected from a survey of 324 employees of container terminal operators in Taiwan. The research findings indicate that LMX and OCB positively affected employees' safety behaviour, whereas LMX also had a positive influence on OCB. In addition, results indicated that safety climate positively affected LMX and EI, whereas job stress negatively affected employees' safety behaviour. Specifically, this research evidence of the mediating effects of LMX, EI, OCB, and job stress on the relationships between safety climate and employees' behaviours in container terminal operator. This study has a certain guiding significance for safety research and LMX theory and practice. First, this study emphasizes the importance of LMX, safety climate, emotional intelligence and job stress to employees' OCB and safety behaviors. Second, the results demonstrate the value of LMX, which has been found to be positively correlated with the safety climate. Third, this study reveals that safety climate plays an important impact on employees' OCB, which terminal operators should regard.