Explicit and Implicit Trust Within Safety Culture

Abstract

Safety culture is an important topic for managers in high-hazard industries because a deficient safety culture has been linked to organizational accidents. Many researchers have argued that trust plays a central role in models of safety culture but trust has rarely been measured in safety culture/climate studies. This article used explicit (direct) and implicit (indirect) measures to assess trust at a UK gas plant. Explicit measures assessed trust by asking workers to consider and state their attitude to attitude objects. Implicit measures assessed trust in a more subtle way by using a priming task that relies on automatic attitude activation. The results show that workers expressed explicit trust for their workmates, supervisors, and senior managers, but only expressed implicit trust for their workmates. The article proposes a model that conceptualizes explicit trust as part of the surface levels of safety culture and implicit trust as part of the deeper levels of safety culture. An unintended finding was the positive relationship between implicit measures of trust and distrust, which suggests that trust and distrust are separate constructs. The article concludes by considering the implications for safety culture and trust and distrust in high-hazard industries.

Development and Validation of a Safety Attitude Scale for Coal Miners in China

“…The result of the correlation analysis demonstrates that the team safety climate and management safety commitment are weakly related to the safety attitude, which differed from the findings of other researchers [29,30]. However, the team safety climate and management safety commitment have a moderate correlation with each other, as both of them are explored from the "safety software and concept".…”

‘When Food Kills’: A socio-technical systems analysis of the UK Pennington 1996 and 2005 E. coli O157 Outbreak reports

“…According to Clayton and Griffith (2008) a number of studies indicate that although disregard for hygiene practices is sometimes due to negligence by the individual, it is often related to the prevailing organisational culture (Griffith et al, 2010) within the food industry. In this case it is important to realize the importance of trust (Burns et al, 2006) between the individual (workers, customers) and the organization (Schlosser, 2001) as this will influence safety in food production areas.…”

Risk information source preferences in construction workers

“…This may lead to an increase in trust for those workers through more positive perceptions of their benevolence and integrity, which as per Mayer et al (1995) are important factors of trustworthiness. This may also lead to a more positive safety culture within the organisation as trust is the foundation of an effective safety culture (Burns, Mearns, & McGeorge, 2006).…”