The Evaluation of Importance of Safety Behaviors in a Steel Manufacturer by Entropy

Background: this study aimed to evaluate the workers safety behavior and to determine the importance of each unsafe behavior in an iranian steel manufacturing company.methods: this study was conducted in mobareke steel manufacturing company, which is located in the middle of iran, in 2007. the methodology was based on the safety behavior sampling (sbs) techniqueand entropy. after specifying the unsafe behaviors and with reference to the results of a pilotstudy a sample of3248 was determined, with a sampling accuracy of5% and confidence level of 95%.results: the results indicated that 41.8% of workers behaviors were unsafe. the most frequent unsafebehaviors were inappropriate use of personal protective equipments (ppes) with 32% of total unsafebehaviors. the results also notified a significant relationship between age, job experience and educationailevel on unsafe behaviors (p< 0.05). the highest weight, which is obtained by entropy, belongsto using inappropriate tools with weight of 0.1425. the ultimate findings of the study showed that aconsiderable number of workers' behaviors were unsafe, which is one of the main antecedents of industrialaccidents.conclusion: considering catastrophic consequences of accidents in steel manufacturing industry, theresults emphasize on diminishing unsafe behaviors and recommends applying behavior based safetyprinciples