ABSTRACT
Owing to the pursuit to eliminate improper human attitudes and behavior, we can witness an
1 INTRODUCTION
The intellectual development and resulting from it greater awareness of the society is changing also the approach to the problem of occupational health and safety. While as far back as in the 1970s, it was commonly believed that the level of occupational safety depends principally on the proper selection of equipment and tools ensured at the workplace, at the turn of 1970s and 1980s, through the introduction of the management through objectives policy and by perceiving the work process as a system, a so called human factor was given more consideration. It was becoming more apparent that the occupational safety of working staff, apart from the conditions involving the impact of energy risk factor at the workplace, is also dependant on the attitude and behavior of the workers. Apart from the employed strategies aiming to obtain the desired occupational safety objectives (creating an appropriate safety level) by ensuring top reliability standards of machinery and tools, or by ensuring access to protective facilities reducing the level of energy emission which might be hazardous to life/health, we could also witness the emergence
increasing interest in practical applications offered by non-technical fields of science, e.g. work psychology, or generally understood management. More and more frequently, the approach to OHS problems is based on the assumption that the occupational safety is the resultant of three elements (Bukowski et al. 1992), (Cieślak et al. 2000), (Szopa 2009):
• material and social surrounding, • workers – their psychophysical predispositions,
qualifications and experience, • behavior of the workers.
