A influência dos fatores organizacionais nos acidentes do trabalho: estudo de caso de uma mineradora

• Ano de defesa: 2004
• Autor(a) principal: Joao Jorge Gandra
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais; UFMG
• Palavras-chave em Português: Fatores organizacionais; Acidente do trabalho; Segurança do trabalho; Modelo causal de acidentes; Trabalho; Administração; Acidentes do trabalho
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/BUBD-9AKRCN

Workplace accidents represent a dysfunction of the production process. Traditionally, accidents have been treated by organizations as failures of employees to interact safely with the work environment and equipment. This micro approach favored the surfacing of theories and safety systems that focused understanding and controlling employee behavior. Theinadequacy of this approach became evident when incident rates did not reduce according to expectations. In spite of this, several safety professionals continued to insist that employee behavior and the failure of perception of risks present in the work environment were theprinciple contributing factors towards the occurrence of accidents. The result of this research resulted in a conceptual inversion of those traditional models. This represents a paradigm shift in the traditional approach of blaming workers for the occurrence of accidents tounderstanding the influence of organizational structures as a major contributing factor to the occurrence of accidents. The objective of this research was to show how latent failures in the strata of the rganizational hierarchy can trigger the occurrence of accidents. The research to support these data was done in an important mining company in the state of Minas Gerais, Brasil. To obtain the managers perceptions of the hierarchical structure; in depth interviews and questionnaires were used. The results indicated the fatal accidents occurred as a result oflatent failures in the organizational structure such as a conflict between safety and production objectives, lack of training, inadequate decision making processes and inadequate technical systems amongst others. To support the findings of this study a questionnaire based onvarious safety management theories was used to quantify the findings of research that was conducted. A causal accident model was suggested which was submitted to statistical techniques, mainly structural equations modeling, that allowed reasonable accuracy of theparameters of the causal relationships among the studied constructs. The result was the creation of a causal model explaining the relation between safety culture management behavior, employee attitude and the conflict between incompatible goals of safety and production. This accident causal model, pioneered in Brazil, will in the future be built upon and improved by new studies.