Assessing and developing safety management competences

Abstract

Introduction: Assessing and developing managers’ safety competence is one method for achieving high safety performance in the organisations. Objectives: The aim of this study is to construct a safety management competence development framework to help organisations in safety promotion. Materials and methods: This study comprises a theory-based construction of the safety management competence development framework and an empirical study in a case organisation. Results: The framework consists of definition of safety management competence requirements, self-assessment of the competence, definition of development needs, and implementation of competence development activities. Conclusions: The framework provides the means for systematically improving managers’ safety management competence as an integral part of general management competence development procedures in organisations.

Supporting Occupational Health and Safety Risk Assessment Skills: A Case Study of Five Companies

“…The Delphi survey provided information gathered from OHS experts on what they considered to be the important OHS risk assessment skills of people working in different roles. The role of safety experts in research extensively covers the need for safety management and related training, but there are few actual competence criteria related to purely risk assessment [48][49][50]. The present study shows that the experts agreed that the most important issue for an employee's OHS risk assessment skills is identifying the hazards of their own work and minimizing the associated risks.…”