Effect of Health and Safety Practices on Job Satisfaction of Field Employees in Ceylon Electricity Board, Area Office in Gampaha

Abstract

Occupational health and safety practices are one of key functions under Human Resource Management. The primary objective of health and safety practices is, to provide employee freedom from physical and emotional illness and to protect employees from injuries caused by work related accidents. Health and safety practices can be affected to other outcomes such as high employee morale, high job satisfaction, decrease absenteeism and increase productivity. Ceylon Electricity Board Gampaha area office is one of a branch; which is responsible to electricity power distribution. The management is highly concern on to provide better health and safety practices for field employees, because of the high risk physical working situations with related to their job. They have to bear huge financial expenditure on health and safety practices as well. The management is very much interested in identifying whether there is an effect of health and safety practices on job satisfaction of field employees. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to identify the effect of health and safety practices on job satisfaction. The researcher started the study by going through relevant literature. Then data were collected from 60 field employees through a self-administered questionnaire, which was developed on five point Likert scale. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20.0 was used to analyze the collected data. Descriptive statistics, correlation coefficient and simple regression analysis aided in the analysis of data. Findings suggested that there was a significant weak positive relationship between health and safety practices and job satisfaction (R = 0.299); and the regression analysis revealed (R2 = 0.089) that health and safety practices could explain the variation of 8.9% of job satisfaction. In sum, this study indicated the significant positive effect of health and safety practices on job satisfaction.