Determining the relationships among safety climate, safety leadership, psychological contract of safety, and safety performance using fuzzy Approach and intelligent adaptive algorithm among workers in Azerbaijan Steel Company

Abstract

Abstract Safety has always been a key issue in the steel industry. Safety climate as a subset of organizational climate causes the formation of people's behavior through their expectations about organizational values. According to social exchange theory, when one party acts in a way that benefits the other party, an implicit commitment to future mutual cooperation is created. Therefore, a psychological contract is formed as a result of social exchange between people. The psychological safety contract is described as people's beliefs about mutual safety obligations, which can be inferred as implicit or explicit obligations. Another way to reduce accidents and human errors in industries is effective safety leadership. The power and leadership style of managers and supervisors have been raised as key factors in safety issues. Safety leadership increases the motivation of the work team to work harder, work more effectively, and take greater responsibility for safety performance. The purpose of this research was to use the fuzzy approach and intelligent adaptive algorithm to study the relationship between safety climate, safety leadership, psychological contract factors and safety performance in Azerbaijan Steel.

Materials and methods: The present study is a descriptive-analytical cross-sectional study that was carried out in Azerbaijan Steel Company. A questionnaire was conducted among the employees. This survey included determining the status of safety climate, determining the status of safety leadership, determining the status of psychological contract factors and determining the status of safety performance in the desired industry. For each of the studied factors, questionnaires whose validity was measured were used. The questionnaires include two parts, the first part includes questions related to demographic information related to age, gender, occupation and work experience, the second part of questions includes the assessment of factors affecting safety performance. All questionnaires were answered using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from completely disagree to completely agree. The results were analyzed quantitatively. In this study, decision-making methods including entropy and fuzzy TOPSIS and statistical analyzes and modeling were used for data analysis.

Results: The results of the study show that the background and accident history of the workers have a significant and positive relationship with the state of safety climate,

psychological contract of safety and safety performance. Also, psychological contract and safety climate have a direct and meaningful relationship on safety performance. Safety climate and psychological contract play a mediating role between safety leadership and safety performance. The results of the safety climate section showed that among the six sub-criteria of safety climate, including management commitment, communication, supervisors' understanding of safety, colleagues' understanding of safety, work pressure and cooperation with safety, supervisors' understanding of safety has the highest impact on the organization's safety climate. The results of the safety leadership section showed that among the two sub-criteria of safety leadership including transactional leadership and transformational leadership, transformational leadership has more weight and role in creating correct safety leadership among employees. The results of safety performance showed that among the two sub-criteria, including participation in safety and safety compliance, safety compliance has a greater weight and impact on safety performance. The output of decision models shows that among the main criteria including safety climate, safety leadership and psychological contract, safety climate has the highest weight and impact on safety performance.

Discussion and conclusion: Based on the review of all the sub-criteria, the employees of Azarbaijan Steel Company acknowledged that the safety understanding of supervisors has the highest weight and influence in improving all criteria and reducing accidents. The relationship between safety leadership and safety performance was not significant, and one of the reasons for this could be the employees' mental history of safety leadership over the years. Maybe future studies will report this relationship directly and meaningfully. Also, the low average score of safety climate, safety leadership and safety performance shows that it is necessary to plan and implement intervention measures by the company.