Selected Bibliography
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Safety Culture - Part 2 |
Safety Culture, Part 2
Guldenmund, F.W. (1998) The nature of safety culture: A review of theory and research. Paper presented at the 24th International Congress of Applied Psychology, Safety culture Symposium, Aug. 9–14, San Francisco, Calif. US.
This paper reviews the literature on safety culture and safety climate. The main emphasis is on applied research customary in the social psychological or organisational psychological traditions. Although safety culture and climate are generally acknowledged to be important concepts, not much consensus has been reached on the cause, the content and the consequences of safety culture and climate in the past 20 years. Moreover, there is an overall lack of models specifying either the relationship of both concepts with safety and risk management or with safety performance. In this paper, safety culture and climate will be differentiated according to a general framework based on work by Schein (1992 Schein) on organisational culture. This framework distinguishes three levels at which organisational culture can be studied ¯¯ basis assumptions, espoused values and artefacts. At the level of espoused values we find attitudes, which are equated with safety climate. The basic assumptions, however, form the core of the culture. It is argued that these basic assumptions do not have to be specifically about safety, although it is considered a good sign if they are. It is concluded that safety climate might be considered an alternative safety performance indicator and that research should focus on its scientific validity. More important, however, is the assessment of an organisation's basic assumptions, since these are assumed to be explanatory to its attitudes.
Author Keywords: Safety culture; Organisational culture; Safety climate; Safety attitudes; Questionnaire research; Safety performance indicator
L. Ostrom, C. Wilhemsen, and B. Kaplan
The concept of safety culture developed in the aftermath of Chernobyl disaster. Researchers, however, have known for many years that safety performance is affected by an organization's socially transmitted beliefs and attitudes toward safety. The safety culture of an organization is very complex and hard to study, but it is possible to examine norms that make up the culture. A written survey instrument was developed to examine the safety culture of EG&G Idaho, Inc., a Department of Energy (DOE) contractor at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory (INEL). This instrument was developed by determining safety norms of the organization and then developing statement that reflect those norms for inclusion in the survey instrument. The survey instrument was used by DOE to assess the safety culture at INEL. Statistical test on the data from the survey showed that the instrument had good internal consistency. The survey instrument, which is included in the article, appears to have merit for use by non-INEL organizations. This article also discusses how the survey should be administered and how the results can be used to help improve the safety culture of an organization.
Cultural influences on risks and risk management: six case studies
van Vuuren, W., Safety Science, Feb 2000
Ever since the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant on 28 March 1979, the term `safety culture' has been a hot topic for both researchers and organisations. Both the content and causes of a poor safety culture have been the focus of numerous research projects, but also its consequences on an organisation's safety performance and the way organisations should be `designed' to facilitate a `good' safety culture. Since others in this issue focus on the content and causes of safety culture, this article focuses on its consequences from two different but inter-related angles. In the first place, the cultural influences on incident causation are considered. In the second place, the cultural influences on risk management, or specifically incident reporting and analysis, are considered. Both angles are supported by empirical incident data collected in the Dutch steel industry and the medical domain. To collect this data, a risk management approach called PRISMA was used. Further, cultural differences between the domains investigated are highlighted and discussed.
Author Keywords: Cultural influence; Risk; Risk management; Case studies
From research to practical
tools--developing assessment tools for safety management a...
Hurst, N., Journal of Loss Prevention in the Process Industries, Jan 1997
This article illustrates how the findings from research work have been used to develop practical tools for the assessment of safety management systems and attitudes to safety at Major Hazard sites. In describing the process of...
The use of a factor-analytic procedure for assessing the validity of an employee
safety climate model
R. L. Brown and Harold Holmes, received 5 September 1985; revised 1 February
1986. Available online 15 July 2002.
Abstract: This paper assesses the validity of a safety climate measure proposed by Zohar (Safety climate in industrial organizations: Theoretical and applied implications. J. Appl. Psychol. 65(1), 96–101, 1980.) on an American sample of production workers. Using LISREL, confirmatory factor analyses were carried out to test the hypothesis of similar variance-covariance structures (validation of the proposed model). The originally proposed climate model was not supported by the data. An exploratory factor analytic algorithm is then discussed as a means of refining the climate model. A smaller safety climate model was then extracted from the data, and comparisons were made for two groups of employees (accidents versus no accidents). Factorial invariance tests were conducted to test the hypotheses of similar factor patterns, equal units of measurement, equal accuracy of measurement, and equal covariance across factors, between the two groups. The results indicated that the climate structures did not differ between the two groups of interest, subsequently providing a valid and reliable climate measure across the groups. Groups were then compared on climate scores, with differences in climate perception being detected between the groups
