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Safety culture: Philosopher's stone or man ofstraw?Sue Cox a & Rhona Flin ba Centre for Hazard and Risk Management, The Business School, LoughboroughUniversity, Loughborough, LE11 3TU, UKb Department of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Old Aberdeen, AB24 2UB,ScotlandPublished online: 25 Sep 2007.

To cite this article: Sue Cox & Rhona Flin (1998) Safety culture: Philosopher's stone or man of straw?, Work & Stress:An International Journal of Work, Health & Organisations, 12:3, 189-201, DOI: 10.1080/02678379808256861

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WORK & STRESS, 1998, VOL. 12, NO. 3 189-201

Safety culture: philosopher’s stone or man of straw ?

SUE COX Centre for Hazard and Risk Management, The Business School, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK

RHONA FLIN Department of Psychology, University of Aberdeen, Old Aberdeen AB24 2UB, Scotland

Keywords : Safety culture; Safety climate; Safety systems; Safety performance.

This introductory paper to the special issue on Safety Culture considers some of the key issues relating to the nature, measurement and utility of this concept. It argues that there are many important questions s t i l l unanswered: what is safety culture and what is its theoretical basis (the question of definition), is it synonymous with safety climate, what are the essential characteristics of a ‘good’ safety culture and how might they be best measured, what are the reliability, validity and utility of existing measures of safety culture, and how does the concept contribute-if at all-to good safety systems and performance ? Can an organization’s safety culture be related to additional parameters (such as accident and incident performance) which are judged both within and outside the organization by the full range of stake-holders? Finally, the authors consider future issues and the future direction of work in t h i s area.

1. Introduction It was the novelist Hanns Johst, not Henry Ford, who wrote : ‘Whenever I hear the word “culture” ... I reach for my gun’ (Schlageter: 1,l). His words might well reflect some of the frustration that managers and occupational health and safety practitioners experience when they attempt to understand the current academic debate on the definition, measurement and utility of the concept of safety culture. They have to attempt some understanding because it has become the ‘motherhood and apple-pie ’ of safety management that organizations should establish ‘excellent safety cultures ’. This objective has been made a priority within many blue chip organizations such as National Power (Davison 1997), Conoco (Thompson 1997) and British Nuclear Fuels (Rycraft 1997). At the same time the British Health and Safety Executive (HSE) is now actively encouraging organizations to improve their safety culture and it has recently released a generic safety climate questionnaire to support managers and practitioners in that task (Byrom and Corbridge 1997, HSE 1997). The common presumption appears that the attainment of a good safety culture contributes to, if not represents, the solution to all health and safety-related problems: a philosopher’s stone to cure all ills. This presumption needs to be challenged.

While there is indeed some evidence to suggest that assessing the prevailing organizational culture can assist in the identification and management of health and safety issues (Rycraft 1997), the validity of the safety culture concept remains largely unproven. Two principal concerns are being voiced among the academic community. The first is that

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while there is agreement on the general nature of safety culture as a concept, the devil is in the detail, and that detail of definition and management has not yet been properly worked through. The second concern is that a naive belief in the concept has far out-stripped the evidence for its utility. The concept of safety culture has become something of a catch-all for social psychological and human factor issues (Cox and Cox 1996).

A somewhat lethal cocktail of impatience, scientific ignorance and naive optimism may have dangerously inflated our expectations of safety culture. In the extreme, the concept of safety culture may be developing meanings which set it out with the organizational context in which cultural measures are derived. For example, Cox et al. (1998) have studied the prevaihng culture for safety within the European manufacturing sector. Within the study organizations, the notion of participation for safety-related matters (a key aspect of safety culture) did not fit comfortably with the command-control culture which had hitherto dominated production and distribution practices. Overall interpretations of ‘ goodness ’ need to be interpreted judiciously. This is in itself a major concem and in the absence of sound theory the notion of safety culture is in danger of becoming meaningless. There are not yet sufficient hard (or published) data to test the reliability, validity and utility of existing definitions and measures. Neither is there sufficient academic debate to establish a sound theoretical framework for those definitions and measures.

This introductory paper considers and rehearses some of these issues relating to the definition, measurement and utility of hs concept. These issues provide the authors with the framework for this review of the science of safety culture. It seeks to determine whether safety culture is indeed ‘the philosopher’s stone’ for good safety systems and performance or whether it is ‘a man of straw’-a concept with no substance or real application.

2. Background and origins The term ‘safety culture’ first came to prominence as a result of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) initial report on the Chemobyl nuclear accident (IAEA 1986). Since then it has been discussed in other major accident enquiries and analyses of safety failures, such as the Piper Alpha oil platform explosion in the North Sea and the Clapham Junction rail disaster in London. In both cases the Public Inquiry report argued that a poor safety culture within the operating company was an important determinant of the accident (Hidden 1989, Cullen 1990). In these contexts the emphases were primarily on the perceived inadequacies of the prevailing cultures for safety. However, the obverse also pertains. In a statement following the Public Inquiry into plans to build a new pressurized water nuclear reactor a t Sizewell in Essex, a government minister discounted fears that the reactor could be affected by an accident, similar to that which had occurred at Chernobyl. because the UK nuclear industry had a ‘superior safety culture’ (Ministerial Statement 1987). The concept was further promulgated as a plethora of exhortation and guidance on industrial safety culture began to emerge from business organizations and regulators (CBI 1990, IAEA 1991, HSC 1993). The possibility for developing and utilizing culture in a manner which supports safe outcomes clearly underpins government thinking in this particular domain. This belief has provided one impetus for the closer examination of safety culture within UK industry.

Most of the conceptualizations, definitions and ‘measures ’ developed for safety culture have been derived from the more general notion of organizational culture as used throughout the social and management sciences, and given prominence by organizational theorists such as Rohner (1984) and Schein (1985) in the early 1980s (see below). Furthermore, over the past decades the ongoing debate on the nature and measurement of

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safety culture and its relationship with safety climate has, to an extent, mirrored that on organizational culture pursued by organizational theorists (e.g. Denison 1996). In this context, Meyerson (1991) noted, in relation to early studies, that culture seemed to be a code word for the subjective properties of organizational life. To a certain extent, this view was reflected within the earlier definitions of Turner et al. (1989). They defined culture in terms of ‘the set of beliefs, norms, attitudes, roles and social and technical practices concerned with minimizing the exposure of employees, managers, customers and members of the public to conditions considered dangerous or injurious’. Safety culture was seen as a matter of social cognition and normative behaviour (IAEA 1991). In this way of thinking, Pidgeon (1991) argued that safety culture can be conceived of as the constructed systems of meanings through which a given worker, or group of workers, understands the hazards of their world. As such, it was deemed to have relative stability and not to change on an hourly, daily or weekly basis (Cox and Cox 1991). Such a constructed meaning system specifies what is important and legitimate to workers and explains their relationship to matters of work and danger. However, the degree to which such meanings are constructed in synchrony with a particular organization’s goals for safety is subject to variation, and it is possible to envisage how one particular worker or group of workers could construct their own ‘systems of meanings ’ without recourse to organizational frames of reference or to formal hazard and risk assessments (Cox and Cheyne 1998).

3. Safety culture or safety climate One of the most widely used definitions of safety culture was proposed by the Human Factors Working Group of the Advisory Committee on Safety in Nuclear Installations (ACSNI) (HSC 1993: 23). This definition adopts a social psychological perspective and holds that ‘The safety culture of an organisation is the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behaviour that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organisation’s health and safety management ’. However, the literature does not present a unanimous definition-moreover the terms safety culture and safety climate are often used interchangeably, despite a distinct etymology. In organizational science, the constructs of culture and climate have been noted to show a parallel evolution from different theoretical roots (Reichers and Schneider 1990, Denison 1996). The earlier idea of organizational climate can be found in social psychology literature dating from the 1930s, with the later adoption of the concept in the 1960s by researchers as a measurable indicator of an organization’s character. Climate researchers particularly focused on workforce perceptions of the social and managerial aspects of the work environment using quantitative methods (e.g. questionnaire surveys) to gather their data. The construct was generally accepted, without extended debate on definition, as a descriptive variable in the study of organizational effectiveness, although measurement issues and questions of subjectivity could be contentious.

In contrast, the organizational culture researchers devoted more energy to debating definitions than measures, due to a more heterogeneous application of the construct. Borrowed from anthropology, the term culture began to be applied to organizational analysis in the 1950s. Definitions ranged from those of inordinate complexity to catch phrases such as ‘the best way we do things around here’ (Furnham 1997). The emphasis was on uncovering deeper organizational values, underlying assumptions and symbolism, associated with artefacts, rituals, norms and rites of passage. Cultural researchers were also more concerned with the evolution of social systems over time (e.g. Van Maanen 1979, Mohr 1982, Schein 1985). The focus on performance and job satisfaction was less evident;

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methods of investigation tended to be qualitative techniques of participant observation, in- depth interviewing and extended case studies, although questionnaire surveys also featured (Hofstede 1980). The resulting cultural literature is peppered with catchy organizational typologies, such as ‘tough guy macho’ (Deal and Kennedy 1982), or ‘pathological’ (Westrum 1995) beloved by management consultants, despite little evidence for their predictive validity.

Reichers and Schneider (1990) have tracked the evolution of the two concepts and helpfully concluded that ‘culture exists at a lugher level of abstraction than climate, and climate is a manifestation of culture’ (p. 29). However, they detected a recent blurring of both method and theorizing which led them to predict that by the late 1990s there would be ‘ an amalgamated climate/culture concept that exhibits many of the conceptual, methodological, and practical characteristics that are presently unique to one concept or the other’ (p. 31). This has not come to pass. This thesis, but not the prediction, was further developed in a recent review by Denison (1996) who observed that, although on the surface the distinction between culture and climate may appear to be clear, a t the deeper level, when one begins to compare the individual studies that make up the two literatures, the seemingly clear distinctions begin to disappear. In safety research, that blurring has been apparent since the earliest studies of safety climate (Zohar 1980), subsequent investigations of safety culture (Ostrom er al. 1993) and advisory reports which state that ‘the term safety culture has emerged with a meaning that appears to be very similar to climate’ (HSC 1993: 23). Nevertheless, some organizational theorists believe that the original distinction between organizational culture and climate was in fact valid and that it imposed a degree of conceptual and methodological clarity on a theoretically challenging domain. Moran and Volkwein (1992) proposed that ‘A careful consideration of the two constructs, however, yields an awareness of distinctions that must be understood if culture is to avoid becoming so all inclusive that it loses an identifiable conceptual meaning; a problem which Glick (1985) argues has apparently befallen climate research. Similarly, research on organizational climate cannot fruitfully proceed until progress is made regarding the theoretical confusion surrounding it ’, and they emphasized ‘the need for theory to explain the intersecting relationship between organizational culture and climate ’ (p. 22).

Perhaps in relation to safety the possible differences between the two concepts are insufficient to support their independence, one of the other. Perhaps there is but one. If there is, Lee (1993) has argued that safety culture is a more appropriate name than safety climate, ‘because it highlights a quintessential feature, which is that the social system is independent of the people who comprise it-it consists of all that has been acquired and then passed on, all that endures’ (p. 2). On the other hand, Mearns er al. (1997) propose that safety climate is a more appropriate term for questionnaire-based surveys, as these are only capable of sensing surface features discerned from the workforce’s attitudes and perceptions a t a given point in time-a snapshot of the prevailing state of safety. As Reichers and Schneider (1990) would agree, climate can only give an indication of the underlying culture. It cannot capture the full richness of the organization. Cox and Cox (1996) have explored such semantics in the context of healthy organizations. In this vein one could conceive of culture as the organization’s personality. As such it can be perceived of as an emergent property of the organizational system, which is reflected in the relative stability of systems, procedures and behaviours. By contrast, climate represents a more transient mood state, sensitive to external pressures. Thus, safety climate measurements based on workforce perceptions allow management to sense shifts in the workplace atmosphere (in relation to changing business demands and work pressures), that are important as indicators for safety management. While this distinction may be dismissed as a semantic nicety, it offers a more

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restricted and less ambitious conceptualization of the core issues and their operationalization by researchers. Safety climate measures (e.g. Cox and Cheyne 1998, Mearns et al. this issue) tend to focus on current perceptions and attitudes to management and supervision, risk taking, safety policies and practices, and social aspects of the work situation such as trust, openness, discipline, and team support. They do not usually claim to assess fundamental value systems or the organization’s philosophy of management. Not- withstanding this culture versus climate debate (in t h s issue, these terms are used interchangeably, except where authors specify otherwise), questionnaires claiming to measure safety culture or safety climate are almost indistinguishable in terms of their component factors or dimensions (Flin 1998).

4. Nature and measurement of organizational culture for safety In the wake of the post-Chernobyl interest in safety culture, regulators and researchers have attempted to identify a set of characteristics that define a ‘good’ safety culture. The two most frequently cited lists of ‘ good’ characteristics both derive from the nuclear industry. The first is from the International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group’s report on safety culture (IAEA 1991) which concludes with 143 questions, headed ‘safety culture indicators’, on a range of topics from corporate level safety policy to field supervision. It is claimed that these are not intended to be comprehensive or prescriptive but are ‘ to encourage self-examination in organisations’ (p. 22) and include questions such as ‘Do annual performance appraisals include a specific section on attitudes to safety?’ and ‘Is there a clear policy on limits to overtime worked ? ’ These demonstrate that general management factors are addressed as well as specific safety issues. The rationale for the inclusion of particular items is not explained. The second set of culture features comes from the ASCNI Human Factors Study Group report (HSC 1993). Ths was designed to complement the IAEA indicators and it provides a prompt list of 91 items that can be used to characterize the safety culture of a nuclear plant or other potentially hazardous work sites. The whole exercise is based on the assumption that ‘the organisation reviewing its culture already possesses an apparently impressive battery of safety and operating procedures and well trained staff (p. 50). These Characteristics emphasize that attitudes and beliefs towards safety are more critical indicators of the culture than the mere presence of safety policies and procedures, which some proprietary safety audit systems, now claiming to assess safety culture, actually measure. The ASCNI categories include communication, competence, planning, policy, organ- ization, hazard management, risk assessment, management, supervision and occupational stress. In this case while the rationale for the inclusion of individual items is not explicit, the report does explain (p. 50) that the foundations of the prompt-list are (1) contemporary models of accident causation, (2) the key functions of safety management, (3) their working definition of safety culture and (4) research evidence of organizational factors affecting safety culture and the results of validation studies of safety programmes. As the authors of these two reports acknowledge, such lists attempt to be all-embracing,

containing every conceivable parameter of a safety management system, with limited advice on how to assess and if necessary attempt to change aspects of the culture beyond a recommendation to proceed in an incremental fashion. Practitioners and researchers who have investigated the characteristics of, and attempted to model, good safety culture may also have been guilty of encompassing a ‘wish-list’ of the characteristics of good performing companies (see below). Furthermore, the various dimensions of this ideal culture are often focused on those which are relatively easy to measure rather than those that should be measured.

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The theoretical basis for much of the research in the area of safety culture can also be dficult to discern. It rarely extends beyond tangential references to standard texts from the organizational culture literature (Schein 1985) or to psychological models, such as Azjen and Fishbein’s (1980) theory of planned action (which considers the extent to which attitudes can predict behaviour). It could be argued that the safety culture field is at an early stage, hence the requirement for fundamental descriptive work as an empirical basis for inductive theory building and testing. If the research to date is examined, it appears that three principal methods have been adopted in an attempt to deconstruct the essential elements of an organization’s safety culture: (1) case studies, (2) comparative studies and (3) psychometric surveys. There is a growing view that these different approaches are complementary and should not be treated as alternatives (Cox et al. 1997, Dalhng 1997). Taken together. and cross-referenced, they provide a holistic view of the safety culture within the organization, possibly tapping different aspects of organizational structure, function and behaviour.

4.1, Case studies The case study is a favoure‘d qualitative technique for sociologists and organization analysts who are interested in identifying component elements of safety culture. Techniques involving in-depth interviewing and observation, and participant observation are widely used. These studies are typically (1) of organizations who have suffered major accidents (crisis-prone organizations), (2) of organizations who operate in a hazardous environment but who apparently have a low accident rate (high-reliability organizations) and (3) of organizations who are experiencing extensive change.

4.1 .l. Crisis-prone organizations. In many cases (e.g. in major disaster enquiries), the absence of key senior management attributes (e.g. overt commitment) is seen to be a defining characteristic of a poor safety culture. However, such judgements are often made as part of the post-hoc rationalization whch inevitably follows the accident. The exact nature of major accident aetiology has not been established beyond the theoretical m o d e h g put forward by Reason (1997) in terms of latent conditions (see Reason, this issue).

The defining work in this field is Turner’s study of organizations that had experienced a major accident, originally published in 1978 and recently updated (Turner and Pidgeon 1997). He proposed that the critical features present during the incubation period of a major accident (‘ waiting in the wings’) were rigid perceptions, decoy problems, organizational exclusivity, information difficulties, violations, and failure to recognize emergent danger. His conclusions have been endorsed by subsequent qualitative analyses of organizational accidents (Perrow 1984, Pauchant and Mitroff 1992, Vaughn 1996, Reason 1997) which revealed cultures characterized by management complacency, role ambiguity, poor communication, and low prioritization of safety against high pressure for performance. Similar features reappear in Public Inquiry reports of major accidents such as the Piper Alpha explosion (Cullen 1990), the King’s Cross Fire (Fennell1988), the Clapham Junction rail crash (Hidden 1989) and the sinking of the Herald ofFree Enterprise (Sheen 1987). Senior managers’ attention can be attracted by pointing out that huge financial losses (e.g. Barings Bank) may also be caused by this recipe for disaster (Sheaffer et al. 1998).

However informative and interesting, a limitation of this post-hoc case study approach is that while these organizational features were identified as common to the disasters studied, direct causal h k s between conditions and effects still remain elusive. It is dficult to know

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for sure if the characteristics are a reaction to accidents or the cause of them. Causality is a perennially dficult proof but one which can be aided by the inclusion of comparison data from matched organizations whose operations have not been disrupted by a major catastrophe. However, such comparisons may be flawed if such organizations are so positioned by ‘luck’ rather than by design.

4.1.2. High-reliability organizations. There have been studies that have rigorously examined the characteristics of high-reliability organizations, using a multimethod approach of observations, interviews, questionnaires and archival analyses. Such an approach often combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies. For example, US organizations with nearly ‘error free’ records, including power plants, aircraft carriers and air traffic control, have been investigated by La Porte (1996) and by Roberts (1993). Factors deemed critical for the design and maintenance of such safe operations include safety as a primary goal, decentralized authority, systems redundancy, organizational learning and senior man- agement commitment. The absence of an accident to date, however, does not prove that this is a ‘safe’ organization or even one which has a ‘better’ safety culture. Low accidents can be a reflection of low reporting rates. In fact Sagan (1993) points out that many of these so-called safe organizations have a track record of concealed accidents and safety breaches. This debate, between proponents of high reliability versus crisis-prone (normal accidents) approaches, is covered further in theJournal of Contingencies and Crisis Management (1994), 2(4). Nevertheless we can, with due caution, extract from their findings some more indicative evidence about features of a safety culture.

4.1.3. Organizations experiencing change. Recent studies in the offshore industry (Cox and Cheyne 1998) have reviewed the nature of safety culture with a view to makmg recommendations for ongoing improvements, particularly in ‘ change ’ situations. These studies, conducted in both UK waters and the Gulf of Mexico, used a focus group methodology (Morgan 1988), together with other investigating methods, to determine the perceived bamers to safety ‘ excellence ’. Factors such as management commitment, management action, the priority of safety, communication and employee involvement emerged as the most important areas perceived to influence organizational safety culture. Many of those participating in the studies recounted experiences of feeling excluded from important safety matters. In the light of these findings, recommendations were made for involving employees in decision-making processes, in particular building upon collective experiences to secure continuity of safety performance. The studies also highlighted the value of employing multiple methods, whenever possible, in a case study investigation to explore fully the underlying issues. These methods might include, for example, in-depth interviews, employee surveys and document analysis.

4.2. Comparative studies Comparative studies have tended to focus on the comparison of the characteristics of high and low accident plants/departments. Studies of ‘ safe’ organizations-those with a relatively good safety performance as measured by comparatively low accident rates-have been particularly illuminating and have revealed some interesting results. These are discussed by Lee in this issue.

One of the early studies in this area was carried out in a tractor assembly plant by Keenan et al. (1951). They analysed 1941 lost-time accidents over 5 years and identified all the possible factors contributing to accident causation. Correlational analyses across 44

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departments based on each of the previously identified causation factors and accident rates revealed that a ‘clean and comfortable worlung environment’ was the most significant predictor of a ‘good’ safety performance. Tlus may seem an obvious finding given the nature of the work environment; however, the relationship still held when the effect of other variables (e.g. operational congestion, constant production pressure and physical effort) were accounted for using partial correlation techniques. Another, and in some ways more interesting, finding from this study showed that the greater the ‘promotion probability ’ in a department, the lower the accident rate-confirming the importance of individual motivation.

Similar methodologies have been employed in a variety of manufacturing sectors. For example, the relationships between 12 variables, including accident and incident levels, five systems audit measures and employee attitudes and perceptions of safety management practices, were examined in 13 plants located within a single European manufacturing company (Cheyne and Cox 1995). Plants with excellent safety performance, as measured by accident frequencies, were associated with more positive attitudes to safety (particularly perceptions of management commitment to safety). These in turn were correlated with the measures of safety systems compliance and positive aspects of the hazard environment (e.g. well guarded machinery, adequate ventilation, etc.).

Although comparative studies within organizations may be illuminating, the benefits are often limited to localized actions on the basis of reported observations. From a research viewpoint, those intra-organizational studies can be seen to take account of biases of conflicting safety management systems and hazard environments. In terms of good practice, all studies must have adequate controls built into their design. However, studies that rely on comparisons within companies may not be easily generahed, whereas studies across different organizations may not control for confounding variables.

4.3. Psychometric surveys An increasingly popular method of identifying features of the safety culture is the psychometric approach using highly structured questionnaires in large-scale workforce surveys. Following the earlier discussion, these are effectively safety climate surveys and they have mainly been carried out within the energy, chemical process, transport and large manufacturing industries. However, the technique is now being recommended by the HSE (1997) for a broad range of organizations.

Regularly monitoring the opinions and attitudes of site personnel may appear to some managers as a soft and unreliable safety device but organizational surveys of this type are very widely used across business sectors to provide an audit of ‘organizational health’ (Walters 1989, Cox 1998). One might equate this to machine condition monitoring, since waiting for failure to signal the presence of problems can be an expensive strategy. Assessing the state of safety by measuring prevailing perceptions, attitudes and self-reported behaviours can be seen as ‘safety condition monitoring’. This is of course based on the assumptions that the critical predictive features or conditions are being sensed by the survey instrument. The item content of questionnaires is either theoretically derived or based on existing instrummts detailed in the literature. Zohar (1980) is ubiquitously cited as an original study in this area. He surveyed 20 Israeli industrial plants and derived an eight- dimension measure of safety climate, which included safety training, management attitudes, level of risk and work pace. Almost 20 years later this is the growth area in safety measurement (e.g. Cox and Cox 1991, Hofman and Stetzer 1996, Budworth 1997, Diaz and Cabrera 1997, Williamson, et al. 1997) with more recent studies reported in tlus issue.

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As mentioned earlier, there are problems reconciling the constructs represented by the reported factors due to inconsistent labelhg and idiosyncratic item writing. Nevertheless, similar patterns are beginning to emerge, with management commitment to safety, workforce involvement, personal responsibility, attitudes to hazards, rule compliance and workplace conditions identified as common factors (Williamson et al. 1987, Flin 1998, Cox and Cheyne 1998). To test the predictive value of such instruments, self reported accidents and injuries are usually taken as the dependent measure, with varying degrees of success. There have been few formal attempts to synthesize these predictions, although in a recent meta-analysis of ten questionnaire studies, Shannon et al. (1997) found that lower injury rates were associated with empowerment of the workforce, delegation of safety activities and top management taking an active role in health and safety management.

Several recent studies have utdized structural equation modelling in an attempt to identify underpinning architectures or patterns of relationships with antecedent and outcome measures (Rundmo 1992, Flin et al. 1996, Cox et al. 1998). This is done, on the whole, in an attempt to explain the relationships between culture and/or climate dimensions and their impact on a number of safety-related areas (e.g. safety satisfaction, risk perception, accident involvement and rule violation) to discover the most appropriate area to target improvement strategies. Cox et al. (1998) modelled the results of an employee safety survey where commitment to safety was used as a marker of the strength of the organization’s safety climate. These survey data showed that employees’ attitudes to safety could be modelled in terms of three factors: management actions for safety, the quality of safety training and their personal actions for safety. Attitudes with regards to management actions for safety showed the strongest relationship to appraisals of commitment to safety, which was used as an indicator of organizational safety culture. The quality of safety training and personal actions for safety were not directly related to appraisals of commitment to safety. The resultant model was used to inform feedback on safety climate to organizational members. The paper by Cheyne et al. in this issue builds on that work, introducing further variables into the model.

5. Utility of safety culture The anticipated utility of the safety culture concept can possibly be judged by its apparent popularity and its relatively rapid adoption by managers, regulators and academics. This popularity, however, may be more a reflection of effective marketing than of scientific development. It is clear that from a management viewpoint the focus on the safety culture concept has underhed the need for organizations to examine safety from a broader perspective. The need to gain further safety-related improvements and the desire to move organizations off the ‘accident plateau’ (Cox et al. 1997) have fuelled this enthusiasm. Regulators have also highlighted the importance of safety culture. In the Foreword to the Guidelines of their Health and Safety Climate Survey Tool (HSE 1997), the Deputy Director of the HSE acknowledges the importance of a positive safety culture in the achievement of high health and safety standards. Over 100 organizations are now using the HSE tool to profile their safety climate (Byrom 1998). From an academic perspective, Rasmussen (1997) has also identified a trend in social science research paradigms from a focus on prescriptive, normative models toward an interest in identifying behaviour- shaping system features, manifest in naturalistic decision research or within the organ- izational learning theories. In essence, the drive to identify and measure the safety culture represents a shift towards understanding how intrinsic motivations interact with perceived environmental demands.

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If the concept is to fulfil expectations it should provide the scientific basis for planned improvements. This aim has been addressed in a plethora of seminars and symposia. Recent seminars have focused the quest in specific sectors and have considered their distinctive features (e.g. The International Conference on Safety Culture in the Energy Industries, held in the University of Aberdeen, September 1997). However, discussions concerning acceptable definitions of safety culture have appeared to dominate participant debate and, by contrast, discussions concerning improvements have appeared limited. Not with- standing these limitations, participants and organizers have attempted to establish the essential (and common) features of ‘excellent’ safety cultures with a view to securing improvements. In relation to these discussions, Cox el a/ . (1998) noted that the architecture of employee attitudes to safety seemed to be context-dependent, and varied by industrial sector. However, if common features cannot be identified across studies then further analyses may be required to determine whether (and to what extent) higher-order factors such as industry, market or nationality are contributing towards distinctive elements of these safety cultures. Such features have been considered by Simard and Marchand (1995) in relation to safety excellence. In a study of Canadian organizations the socio-economic contexts of the participant organizations were measured with reference to labour market segmentation theory, together with a combination of indlces defining the main operational environments. Regression analyses were performed on the data (Simard 1997) and socio- economic context was found to impact indirectly negatively upon companies’ overall safety performance.

6. Conclusion This position paper has considered and rehearsed some of the current issues and concerns relating to the definition, measurement and utdity of the safety culture concept. The existing definitions have now become generally accepted and the ACSNI definition (HSC 1993) has become somewhat ofa ‘market standard’ within the UK. It is apparent. however, that there is a need to establish a clearer understanding of the relationship between safety culture and safety climate, and the analogy of personality and mood has been adapted from the broader field of organizational psychology, and in particular the study of healthy organizations (Cox and Cox 1996), in an attempt to clarify the situation. Existing literature would seem to indicate that both concepts have a place in theory building and development; however, safety climate appears to be the preferred metric a t this stage of evolution. Safety climate studies usually offer a limited set of variables based on workforce attitudes and perceptions that can be operationalized and measured. There is also less danger of over- interpretation of results from this perspective, and limitations can be conveyed to managers eager to adopt new measurement techniques. There is also much to build upon if the concept is to mature in a measured manner.

This review set out to determine whether safety culture was a ’philosopher’s stone’ or merely a ‘man of straw’. It seems, on the basis of existing evidence, that the quest to establish the former status is well underway and that there is much to be gained from a rigorous and controlled focus on organizational safety culture. Future efforts in this field by appropriate stakeholders, while falling sensibly short of establishing its role as philosopher’s stone, may establish it as one of the central concepts in health and safety management.

6.1. Future directions Consideration of case study, comparative and survey data gives the impression that there may be a set of core variables that could help to characterize all organizational cultures for

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safety. These variables are, however, being derived from very similar premises and the ‘bottom line’ in many cases appears nothing more mysterious than the application of good management practices in the safety area. Management commitment and clarity of safety actions are examples of such core variables. Wherever possible, future studies should move towards using sets of core variables.

The very nature of safety climate suggests that it will be context-dependent, and this contextulization is desirable since it offers a means of testing the generality of emerging principles. It is unlikely, however, that safety culture or safety climate could be described adequately using one measure, although ethnographic research techniques are extremely expensive and time consuming, and they do not lend themselves to the rapid interventions required by industrial managers. Studies employing multiple methods are desirable as a longer term research objective, and the safety field needs closer ties with ongoing research into operations management and human resource management practices, which might provide some pointers towards the application of data triangulation (Cox and Cheyne 1998).

Multilevel analyses are also necessary, and most of the larger data sets derived from current studies permit these to be carried out. However, meta-analyses of different data sets are also now required if core variables are to be identified with any degree of confidence. The implications for safety culture of multinational operations is also an area which needs careful consideration. Some cross-national work (e.g. Helmreich and Merrit’s 1998 research into international airlines and cross-national crews) needs to be instigated as major companies (e.g. those in the energy production sector) expand their operations world-wide.

Finally, the messages that are sent to practitioners and managers need to be clear and to emphasize the benefits of examining organizational culture for safety. Studies in this area offer opportunities to provide closer integration between management practice and safety management, as in ‘good safety is good business’. They may also support cultural ‘benchmarking ’, which has been effective in establishing and promoting safety standards (Miller and Cox 1997). There is also an increasing demand for engineering changes in prevailing culture for safety. Such changes need to have a sound theoretical basis if senior managers are to keep faith with the concept.

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