Perspectives on safety culture

Abstract

Overviewing selected elements from the literature, this paper locates the notion of safety culture within its parent concept of organisational culture. A distinction is drawn between functionalist and interpretive perspectives on organisational culture. The terms 'culture' and 'climate' are clarified as they are typically applied to organisations and to safety. A contrast is drawn between strategic top down and data-driven bottom up approaches to human factors as an illustrative aspect of safety. A safety case study is used to illustrate two measurement approaches. Key issues for future study include valid measurement of safety culture and developing methods to adequately represent mechanisms through which safety culture might influence, and be influenced by, other safety factors.

Safety Culture in Financial Trading: An Analysis of Trading Misconduct Investigations

“…aviation, health care, nuclear power, military) (Cooper 2000;Guldenmund 2000;Mearns et al 2001;Pidgeon 1998;Reiman and Oedewald 2004). Although different approaches exist to theorise and measure organisational culture (Cameron and Quinn 2005;Erez and Gati 2004;Hofstede et al 1990), safety culture has become the dominant theory used to understand how cultural factors determine risk practices in industries that must balance competing demands of productivity and safety (Glendon and Stanton 2000;Nordlöf et al 2015). This is because safety culture explains how social environments directly influence risk practices and because problems in safety culture often underlie mishaps within other high-risk domains (e.g.…”

OSCI: an organisational and safety climate inventory

“…ACSNI, 1993;Guldenmund, 2000;Zohar, 1980) and safety climate (e.g. Glendon and Stanton, 2000;Glendon and Litherland, 2001;Zohar, 1980) on issues pertaining to accidents and safety behaviour, the interplay and the relationship between the two has been insufficiently explored. Therefore, the main purpose of this paper is to propose an instrument to assess both organisational climate and safety climate.…”

“…Studies used the terms ''safety culture'' and ''safety climate'' interchangeably, giving rise to many discussion papers (e.g. Glendon and Stanton, 2000;Guldenmund, 2000;Mearns and Flin, 1999;Pidgeon, 1998). This issue represented one of the main theoretical problems in this field.…”

Fatores constituintes da cultura de segurança: olhar sobre a indústria de mineração

“…When organizational culture prioritizes work safety, then safety culture is present in the organization (Glendon & Stanton, 2000;Silva & Lima, 2004).…”