Safety sans Frontières: An International Safety Culture Model

Abstract

The management of safety culture in international and culturally diverse organizations is a concern for many high-risk industries. Yet, research has primarily developed models of safety culture within Western countries, and there is a need to extend investigations of safety culture to global environments. We examined (i) whether safety culture can be reliably measured within a single industry operating across different cultural environments, and (ii) if there is an association between safety culture and national culture. The psychometric properties of a safety culture model developed for the air traffic management (ATM) industry were examined in 17 European countries from four culturally distinct regions of Europe (North, East, South, West). Participants were ATM operational staff (n = 5,176) and management staff (n = 1,230). Through employing multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, good psychometric properties of the model were established. This demonstrates, for the first time, that when safety culture models are tailored to a specific industry, they can operate consistently across national boundaries and occupational groups. Additionally, safety culture scores at both regional and national levels were associated with country-level data on Hofstede's five national culture dimensions (collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and long-term orientation). MANOVAs indicated safety culture to be most positive in Northern Europe, less so in Western and Eastern Europe, and least positive in Southern Europe. This indicates that national cultural traits may influence the development of organizational safety culture, with significant implications for safety culture theory and practice.

Human factors and ergonomics methods in practice: three fundamental constraints

“…The EUROCONTROL safety culture questionnaire (Reader et al 2015;Noort et al 2016), which has been applied to over 30 air navigation service providers (over 30 countries) throughout Europe, has undergone several iterations. Each of these has improved the validity of the questionnaire, but each makes comparison with past data more difficult.…”

“…Shorrock and Kirwan 2002;Isaac, Shorrock, and Kirwan 2002;Isaac et al 2003;Shorrock 2005); safety assessment (Clark, Shorrock, and Turley 2008;Williams , Haslam, and Weiss 2008); human factors integration (Shorrock, Woldring, and Hughes 2004;Shorrock and Woldring 2006); human factors assessment (Jones et al 2003); managing system disturbances (Shorrock and Str€ ater 2004;Shorrock and Straeter 2006); and safety culture Shorrock 2012;Reader et al 2015;Noort et al 2016). One of the authors also has experience in the formal evaluation of HF/E methods (Olsen and Shorrock 2010;Shorrock 2003), and in research on the research-practice relationship (Chung and Shorrock 2011).…”

Safety Climate in Organizations

“…Considering the features of the contemporary economy, the management of organizational safety in international and culturally diverse organizations is a concern for many high-risk industries (Reader, Noort, Shorrock, & Kirwan, 2015). Although there is evidence that safety climate may generalize across organisations (e.g., Mearns et al, 2001), and industries (e.g., Hahn & Murphy, 2008), there has been limited attention given to generalization across national cultures (Zohar, 2014).…”

“…Third, safety-critical work is often performed by multicultural and co-located teams (Manzey & Marold, 2009). Although this diversity can be positive by bringing together different perspectives on safety (Reader et al, 2015), it also presents a challenge for safety management (Kouabenan, 2009). Different cultural values, beliefs and social representations (Cavazza & Serpe, 2009) about the way individuals contribute to safety may also strongly affect the influence of safety climate on more discretional forms of safety behaviors.…”

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

“…Indeed, safety culture measurement and improvement has become an integral part of Risk Management within domains such as health care, aviation, offshore oil and gas production, and nuclear power (Carroll 1998;Mearns et al 2001;Reader et al 2015;Weaver et al 2013). Yet, no comparable approach exists for financial trading, and in the context of financial organisations being required to monitor and improve Risk Management and organisational culture (IIF 2009; Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards 2013), safety culture theory appears useful for the following three reasons.…”