Elsevier

Safety Science

Volume 34, Issues 1–3, February 2000, Pages 193-214
Safety Science

Perspectives on safety culture

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0925-7535(00)00013-8Get rights and content

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.

Section snippets

Organisational culture and safety culture

Organisational culture, however defined, is widely acknowledged to be critical to an organisation's success or failure, for example in business. Graves (1986) and Williams et al. (1989) consider that the prime function of culture is to contribute to an organisation's success. Analogously, safety culture is frequently identified, for example by disaster inquiries, as being fundamental to an organisation's ability to manage safety-related aspects of its operations — successfully or otherwise.

Dimensions of organisational culture

A number of attempts have been made to map the main features or levels of organisational culture. A few are summarised in Table 1.

A large degree of concurrence exists between espoused models. For the content of organisational culture, a three-level classification embodying relatively accessible, intermediate and deep levels, forms the basis for the composite model outlined. The most accessible level refers to observable behaviours and perhaps associated norms. At an intermediate level are

Organisational culture and organisational climate

Confusion between the terms ‘culture’ and ‘climate’ means that they have been used interchangeably. While there is a relationship and some overlap between these terms, organisational climate refers to the perceived quality of an organisation's internal environment. In a review by Rousseau (1988) of 13 definitions derived over a 21-year period, employee attitudes and perceptions featured prominently. Typical was the definition proffered by James and Jones (1974), of “psychologically meaningful

Contrasting approaches: strategic safety and human reliability assessment

This section contrasts idealised elements typical of top down and bottom up approaches to one aspect of safety culture, human factors. Senior management develops a top-down driven strategy on safety as part of an organisation's overall strategy for business or other mission. This includes risk management strategy, including all aspects of risk — pure and speculative, including insurance and loss control, financial investments and business interruptions. A key aspect is a safety management

An ethnographic alternative

Comprehensive ethnographic studies of safety within contemporary organisations are awaited, although an early example of this genre is Gouldner (1955), while Powell et al. (1971) carried out a detailed workplace observational study of accidents. In this section we first address some shortcomings of other methods in measuring safety culture or climate, before considering an alternative methodology that represents an attempt at measurement from an interpretive perspective. It is clear from the

Conclusions

Debate on organisational culture and climate and their derivatives, safety culture and safety climate, remains at an early developmental stage. Within organisational practices, there are signs of some convergence between theoretically distinct functionalist and interpretive approaches. It is appropriate to maintain a distinction between the overlapping concepts of safety culture and safety climate.

Most studies, mainly using questionnaires, have measured safety climate dimensions. Only a few

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