Safety culture assessment and its relationship with the personality traits of sports facility managers

Background and aims: Today, functions of exercise and physical activity in different aspects are hidden to no one. Sports lead to individuals’ well-being and society’s health, create life safety in all physical, psychological, mental, and emotional aspects, etc. and attract the attention of the committed officials in any society. Accordingly, great investments are made in many countries to provide the grounds for every member of the society to be benefited. However, the results of several studies show that many people suffer from multiple injuries and sometimes die as they are doing sports activities. Therefore, sport is one of the high-risk activities with many professional damages that apart from economic costs on the health, include very serious psychological costs on athletes, families in specific and the whole society, in general. Today, it is believed that most of the accidents (about 85 percent) are due to the errors and carelessness of the employees. Therefore, it seems that Improving the safety culture is a basic solution to reduce these accidents in sports events and fields. Safety culture refers to a set of beliefs, motifs, norms, roles and performances that reduce the encounter of employees and managers to dangerous situations. If the governing safety culture in an organization is positive and desirable, this culture, as an effective factor, can commit all elements of the organization to have a major contribution to the safety of themselves and their colleagues. Management is the key element in the safety culture. Management is the key element in safety culture. Managers play a key and essential role in improving the safety culture, preventing accidents and improving job performance and culturalization, and accelerating the process. Among factors affecting occupational performance is the individuals' personality because the individual personality determines his/ her motivation and attitude toward job and the way the individual responds to job requirements. Today, the value of the personality has been accepted as one of the predictors of occupational and behavioral performance.  According to the researchers, unsafe behaviors are highly influenced by individuals’ personal traits because the individuals’ personality traits determine their motifs and attitudes towards their job and how they meet job requirements. Therefore, individuals related to sensitive and safety-related conditions should be highly sensitive to observe safety principles proportionate to their characteristics and consider creating a positive safety culture as an essential issue in sports activities to reduce accidents effectively. Therefore, by identifying and investigating the personality dimensions of sports places managers, it can be used as a predictor of unsafe behaviors.  In summary, paying attention to numerous risks in sports activities is essential and taking safety culture into consideration as a major priority is natural is sports. Considering the role and responsibility of sport field managers in safety and health of athletes, spectators and other visitors, the present study aims at evaluating the safety culture among sport field managers based on IAEA Model and its relationship with their Demographic characteristics and personality. This study aims at answering the following questions: first, how is safety culture among sport field managers? Second, what is the relationship between the positive safety culture and Demographic characteristics and personality of sport field managers (gender, being extroverted or introverted, and experience and education level)? Methods: This is an applied study in terms of purpose, a descriptive survey in terms of data collection methodology, and a correlation study in terms of data analysis. The research population includes all the sport field managers in Iran that consists of 22167 participants according to the statistics of the Development and Maintenance of Sports Facilities of Iran. The sample size included 379 participants based on the table of Krejcie and Morgan. Considering the level of errors due to not receiving complete questionnaires (the questionnaires being lost, not answering them, incomplete and invalid questionnaires), a number of 416 questionnaires were distributed and finally, 400 appropriate and flawless questionnaires were collected and analyzed. Multistage sampling was conducted on different provinces and cities and finally, the sample was selected using simple random sampling. The research tools included Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) (1968) and demographic variables including 25 questions and the Safety Culture Survey including 35 questions related to the field of learning and teaching, responsibility, safety priorities, leadership and safety integrity. To insure the face and content validity of the questionnaire, its first edition was investigated by the experts in the field and the required corrections were applied on the items according to experts’ comments. The questionnaires were used after the experts confirmed them. The questionnaires’ reliability was calculated to be 0.76 for the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and 0.82 for the Safety Culture Survey in a preliminary study by internal consistency through Chronbach’s alpha. Descriptive statistics (frequency tables, frequency percentage, average and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (variance analysis, independent T-test, Pearson’s correlation coefficient and logistic regression) were used for data analysis using SPSS 19 at the significance level of p > 0.05. Results: Demographic findings of the research showed that the majority of the statistical male sample (68.5%) holds bachelor degree (44.5%) and master degree (29.5%). Results showed that the mean safety culture of sport field managers was 130.12 And its standard deviation was 21.5. The score above 105 is regarded as the positive safety culture. The independent T-test showed that the average score of safety culture is higher in women than men and the difference is significant according to the value of t + -2.970 at the significance level of P = 0.00. Results of ANOVA showed that although by the increase in the work experience, the level of safety culture increases, while no significant relationship was observed between the two variables (P = 0.657). Results of ANOVA showed that by an increase in education level, the positive safety culture increases, while the relationship was not significant statistically (P = 0.391). Eta correlation coefficient showed that there is a significant (P = 0.01) negative (r = - 0.19) relationship between being extroverted and the safety culture. Moreover, there is a significant (P 0.00) and direct (r = 0.29) relationship between being introverted and the safety culture. Considering the type of variables and using eta correlation coefficient to investigate the correlation between the variables, logistic regression was used to determine which variables are strong predictors of safety culture. For overall estimation of the model, omnibus test analysis was used. Omnibus test showed that the logistic regression model was significant. That is, it can predict the variables efficiently. The log-likelihood of logistic regression showed that the variables are 69 percent able to determine the dependent variable. The results of Hosmer-Lemeshow test (HL test) for regression fitting showed that the model is appropriate and fit well. This means that a series of variables have predicted the criterion variable. Therefore, the predictors of safety culture should be identified from among the variables. Results of odds ratio showed that the odd ratio of being introverted and extroverted is relatively good. The odds ratio equals beta (β) in linear regression. The ratio was significant with 0.39 for being extroverted and 0.48 for being introverted. In general, the more extroverted the person is, the safety culture increases and it is vice versa regarding being introverted. In this regard, classification of the average values of safety culture aspects showed that safety priority with an average value of 31.5 and responsibility with an average value of 24.2 had the greatest and smallest average values. Conclusion: Conclusion: The safety culture is an essential element to prevent accidents from occurring in sports places and events. In the view of researchers, the incidence of unsafe behaviors is greatly under the influence of personality traits of individuals, especially managers. Therefore, the current research aims to investigate the relationship between personality traits of sports places' managers and their safety culture. Results showed that the safety culture has a significant relationship with gender, extroversion, and introversion of managers, but has no significant relationship with work experience and education level. It seems that the more positive attitude of women towards occupational issues, psychological and personality traits, higher sensitivity to job safety issues and avoiding risks that makes them attempt to do the assigned tasks in the best way and the least risks, direct more attention to safety culture in women. In addition, unlike the extroverted people who are risk-taking and in search of excitement do not shoulder their responsibilities and believe that accidents are inevitable, the introverted are indecisive, thoughtful and cautious. The introverted believe that events and accidents are results of their actions and are more satisfied with their actions. Since the introverted are conditioned more and quicker, they adapt to the crowd and obey the rules. They pay more attention to the current rules of safety and follow the rules to develop positive safety culture and reduce unsafe actions. Accordingly, the safety culture is higher in the introverted than in the extroverted. Regarding the lack of effect of education level on mangers’ safety culture, it can be stated that courses related to safety in PE is not taught in higher education in the field of physical education. Furthermore, during in-service courses, the training courses are held similarly for all the people at different education levels and this leads to the irrelevance of the awareness of managers and employees about safety and education level. Therefore, investigating different aspects of personality and safety culture, the efficiency in sports organizations can be improved and the accidents in sport events and fields can be reduced besides identifying and assigning people that pay less attention to safety culture to low-risk jobs.