IRAN OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH JOURNAL
Year:2010 | Volume:7 | Issue:3|Papers Count:11

Background and aims: Managers who rely on ethical values, have considerable effects on Employees’ feeling of energy, empowerment and creativity. Ethical leadership which is a relative new construct, has considerable role in creating healthy work climate. In this regard, this research was administered with the aim of investigating the role of ethical leadership on reinforcing feeling of energy, empowerment and employees’ creativity.Methods: Research statistical population were the total of Haier factory employees in autumn of 1388.Amongthem, 332personsas the research sample were selected with the use of stratified sampling (from personnel's list of each section). Research instruments which used for assessment of variables including feeling of energy at work with 8 items, creativity at work with 9 items, psychological empowerment with 12 items and ethical leadership with 6 items. Data were analyzed using Pearson's correlation coefficient, structure equation modeling and mediating regression analysis.Results: Results showed that ethical leadership directly reinforces empowerment and energy at work and feeling of energy at work also reinforces empowerment. But in a process analysis, feeling of energy and psychological empowerment after being reinforced through ethical leadership, reinforce employees’ creativity at work.Conclusion: The evidences of this research revealed the role of leaders and managers' tendencies to ethical leadership on feeling of energy at work, psychological empowerment and employees' creativity at work. On the basis of the findings, for reinforcing employees' vitality, empowerment and creativity, supervisors and managers' should be complied with ethical leadership principles in their management.

Background and aims: The degree to which a person perceives that the outcomes of the situations they experience are under their personal control is a psychological variable known as Locus of Control (LOC). Safety LOC is the construct that specifically address the internal and external LOC in industrial domain. Previous research suggest that safety locus of control can be assessed and used to predict safe behaviors. The main aim of this study was designing, validating, and determining the reliability of safety locus of control scale.Methods: Four hundred workers of Isfahan Steel Company participated in this study. The reliability coefficients were calculated in two different methods: test-retest and Cronbach alpha. In order to survey validity of the scale we used three methods including face validity, content validity and construct validity.Results: We established the content validity of the Persian translation by translating (and then back-translating) each item from the English version into the Persian version. Exploratory principal components analysis yielded a three-factor structure that explaining a considerable proportion of the total variance (63.5). Moreover the fit indices of the Confirmatory Factor Analysis turn out were sufficient to support three- factor structure. In addition, the reliability results were acceptable, too.Conclusion: In most studies, designing, validating and determining the reliability of scales are time consuming and costly and if there are valid and reliable scales in different topics, could avoid repetitious works in researches. The results showed that the reliability and validity of Safety Locus of Control was acceptable and respectable and is suggested as an applicable scale for industrial psychology and safety studies in Iran.

Background and aims: In rapid development in industrialization, lack of attention to safety principles causes a raise in work-related incidents. According to ILO, around one-third of work related deaths is due to. The aim of our study is to survey the causes of occupational incidents at working place under protection of Yazd Social Security Organization in 1384.Methods: This is a descriptive study that was done to determine the incident frequency and factors affecting on it. The study included 776 incidents selected among all of the incidents occurred in 1384inYazd.The data were collected from available information in social security organization.Results: The findings showed that the center of province, has had the most number of incidents (%41.2).Also, the mean age of people who had incident was 29.5. The most causes of incident were related to falling down (%20.8); fingers were injured more than other parts (%31.5). Thehighest consequence of the incidents was related to injuries (%34).Conclusions: The distribution of age among the subjects indicated the prevalence of incident in young workers more than others, which is in the same line with other researches. The cause of most incidents was falling.

Background and aims: In the industrial world, almost everyone is unavoidably exposed to ambient magnetic field (ELF) generated by various technical and household appliances. According to the studies carried out in a power station in Shiraz, psychological disorders caused By jobs are among the most important problems of the workers.Methods: This study is performed to determine the presence or absence of psychological disorders. The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) is used in this study to recognize psychosomatic disorders.Results: Measurements indicate that range of magnetic field varies from 0.087) micro Tesla ( in the phone homes to 30) micro Tesla (in power stations. The results of this study has shown that a significant number of staff which were exposed to magnetic fields and noise) 78.2%) were suspected to have a kind of mental disorders.Conclusion: The results obtained from this study which shows the prevalence of mental Disorders among the suspected case is higher than the results of Noorbala and colleagues study in 2006.Therefore, there are necessities to do more research in order to find the relationship between electric and magnetic fields and psychological disorders.

Background and aims: Safety is a complex concept and multidisciplinary science which is included some difference areas from industrial sectors to urban public arenas. Parks and playgrounds as important public places should be considered in terms of health and safety, especially for kids as prominent social vulnerable citizens. According to CPSC, 147deaths have been reported for under 15year old child during Jan 1990to Aug 2000. Every 2.5 minute, kid suffers playground related accident. The main objective in this study is safety assessment of play grounds among the selected parks.Methods: In this case study, deductive approach and cross-sectional survey was followed, and Some parks and play grounds were selected among five urban counties in Tehran. Our volunteered samples were 160 parents. Play grounds and related equipment were assessed in terms of safety, as well.Results: Our findings show that more than 68% of playground equipment might create hazardous condition for kids. Lack of sustain maintenance for both of equipment and playground surface make some risky area for the mentioned group. Statistical analysis by SPSS Win 13 showed that more than 78%of parents are worry about their child in terms of playground safety problems. Safety assessment of swings and slides showed that there are safety based problems in 89%of cases. Due to statistical reports of Tehran Emergency center, 10-12and 8-10 year old kids suffer play based accident more than others. Reported traumas showed that face and skull and then feet suffered mechanical injury more than other limbs.Conclusion: Surely, safety and health considerations are known as Municipality responsibilities, so for safety improvement in parks an integration safety system should be happened. HSE-MS seems a reliable approach for them entiongoal. For improvement of exist parks and playground some related standard should be follows such as CPSC standards, EN 1176, and EN 1177. Also anthropometric data development for child should be considered.

Background and aims: Nowadays cardiovascular disorders are the most common cause of death in worldwide. Several studies have shown that ischemic cardiovascular diseases are more common in drivers, especially professional drivers, but underlying causes have not been completely understood.Methods: This study was a cross sectional, descriptive-analytic study.1120professional divers who worked with heavy vehicles and referred for periodic examinations to one of the centers of drivers examinations in city of Yazd with simple random sampling included in the study.Results: The study findings showed that age, overweight, cigarette smoking, duration of driving, chronic diseases known as a risk factor for ischemic heart disease, such as diabetes mellitus, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, had a significant relationship with ischemic heart diseases (p<0.05), and second job, family history of ischemic heart diseases risk factors, vehicle type and regular exercise had not a significant relationship with ischemic heart diseases (p>0.05).Conclusion: Because of high prevalence of cardiovascular diseases and their risk factors in drivers and lack of a concentrated system for driver's education, it seems that decreasing of these risk factors requires occupational medicine examination centers educate them too.

Background and aims: Toxic chemical release from process installation is one of the main hazards in chemical industries which can endanger the health of employees and public in the neighbours of industry in case of occurring chemical release accident.The aim of this study was determining hazard distance of toxic chemical release in one of petrochemical complex for its applicability in emergency response planning.Methods: Different possible scenarios for toxic chemical release was considered and the worse case scenarios including process vessels rupture was selected for hazard distance study by aid of Dow Chemical Exposure Index (CEl).Results: Among studied chemical tanks including Chlorine, Phenol, Epichlorohydrin (EPI), Chlorobenzene, Toluene, hydrogen chloride, the highest Chemical Exposure Index (CEI) and hazard distance was for Chlorine with CEI of340 and hazard distance for ERPG 2 and ERPG 3 concentration were 3399and 1339 respectively.Conclusion: Chemical Exposure Index (CEI) can be used for determining hazard distance of a chemical release accident. Hazard distance data can be used in process installation layout and emergency response planning.

Background and aims: The catalytic ozonation is an efficient process for the degradation of volatile organic compounds from contaminated air stream. This study was aimed at investigating the efficacy of catalytic ozonation process in removal of xylene from the polluted air stream and the influence of retention time (gas flow rate), inlet ozone dose and relative humidity on this performance.Methods: the catalytic ozonation of xylene was conducted using a bench scale set-up consisted of a syringe pump, an air pump, an ozone generator, and a glass reactor packed with activated carbon. Several experimental run was defined to investigate the influence of the selected operational variables.Results: The results indicated that the efficiency of catalytic ozonation was greater than that of single adsorption in removal of xylene under similar inlet concentration and relative humidity. We found a significant catalytic effect for activated carbon when used in combination with ozonation process, leading to improvement of xylene removal percentage. In addition, the elimination capacity of the system improved with the increase of inlet ozone dose as well as gas flow rate. The relative humidity showed a positive effect of the xylene removal at the range of 5 to 50%, while the higher humidity (more than 50%) resulted in reduction of the performance.Conclusion: The findings of the present work revealed that the catalytic ozonation process can be an efficient technique for treating the air streams containing industrial concentrations of xylene. Furthermore, there is a practical potential to retrofit the present adsorption systems into the catalytic ozonation simply by coupling them with the ozonation system.