The moderating effect of organizational size on the relationship between internal & external factors of organizations and medical waste management practices in southern Libyan hospitals

The global debate on medical waste management practices is ongoing and well documented in the literature. While some scholars opine that medical waste management is generally lagging behind other industries in terms of practices, others contend that this claim does not reflect the actual condition of the industry which is reasonably done to a certain extent. With respect to identifying the current medical waste management practices in Libya which is experiencing similar problems, this research aims at examining the internal and external factors that have been found to significantly influence medical waste management practices. The objective of this research is to identify the organizational internal and external factors that influence their waste management practices. A proportionate stratified simple random sampling was used to select two hundred and ten respondents from the targeted hospitals in five states in Libya. A total of one-hundred and seventy-one duly completed and valid questionnaires were returned, yielding approximately eighty-one percent response rate. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) analysis were utilised to achieve the research objectives. This research has found that organizational structure, culture, external factors have strong and positive relationships with medical waste management practices. The correlation analysis carried out between the medical waste management practices and, centralization, formalization, individualism vs collectivism and power distance do not establish any significant relationships with segregation respectively. The findings of this research indicate that the moderating effect of organizational size only establishes the relationship between government policy and medical waste management practices. This research therefore, recommends for future studies to look for additional independent variables so that the moderating effects appears to be more significant.