THE IMPACT OF ORGANISATIONAL SAFETY CULTURE ON SAFETY HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT (SHE) IN ZAMBIA’S ELECTRICITY DISTRIBUTION OPERATIONS INDUSTRY

摘要: The electricity industry experiences incidents that can be fatal to people and costly to the organisations. Although electricity is treated at a high level in Zambia, accidents do happen. Additionally, electrical accidents are implied to be rare according to statistics, but most of them still remain unreported, this leads to lack of information about safety related issues in the organisations averting conformance of preventive actions (Mihai & Sorin, 2010). According to Rutter (2010), the current measures to escalate electrical safety are not effective enough without considering the electricity firms’ safety cultural aspects. In the past, several fatalities and serious accidents have occurred to workers working on electrical infrastructure from energized conductors and equipment, lifting of poles and falling from heights to mention but a few (ZESCO Limited, 2015). IRCA Savenda (2015) in their report highlighted that most investigation on the causes of fatalities and accidents are lack of certain safety procedures that are not carried out before any work is conducted or during the process of carrying out that work that is attributed to human error. Other errors are due to violations caused by deprived approach towards safety. The missing feature in the management of SHE in the electricity industry therefore is attributed to the lack of a positive organisational safety culture in distribution operation. This lack of organizational safety culture in SHE management culminates into chain of events that could have been happening for a long period of time. Most underlying causes or immediate causes are related to human factors according to Mihai and Sorin (2010). Systems failure …