Avaliação da maturidade da cultura de segurança de uma indústria química

Abstract

The high levels of work-related injuries still occurring in Brazil and around the world, even in organizations with well-established occupational safety and health management systems, led to development of studies on safety culture. The safety culture can be defined as the set of common characteristics to an organization with regard to the way that work safety is treated. Several studies available in the literature seek to understand and develop safety culture models, however, few use the safety culture as a practical tool for a complete and in-depth diagnosis of safety situation of an organization. The present work had the objective of assess the level of safety culture maturity in a chemical company, thus, it is a case study with a descriptive and exploratory qualitative approach. The research was carried out in a chemical company with sites located in Paraná and in Rio Grande do Sul and it was done by the application of a questionnaire to the employees of all sectors of the company and detailed analysis of the data obtained. The results show that organization studied has a high level of safety culture maturity, being 66.2% sustainable, 15.6% proactive and 12.5% bureaucratic. Specifically, the results allowed the identification of improvement points in all evaluated factors, especially in involvement factor that presented a 43.8% sustainable maturity. The analysis of the safety culture maturity of the different subgroups that participated in the research showed that all the demographic characteristics evaluated have an influence on safety culture. The evaluated characteristics were the work sector, production site, educational level, working time in company, position of leadership, sex and age. The research has shown that the subgroups with the most sustainable maturity are the industrial sector, the production site located in Rio Grande do Sul, and the employees with less schooling, more time in company, who does not occupy a leadership position, male and the age group between 41 and 50 years old. Likewise, it was possible to identify the groups and factors with less developed maturity levels that require improvement actions, such as those between the ages of 21 and 30 and those working in the administrative sector.