ABSTRACT

A necessity in the safety-critical domains (Olive, O’Connor, and Mannan, 2006), an organization’s safety culture is perhaps the most important factor involved in safe system operation. Without one, no amount of safety measures and defenses will guarantee system safety. The importance of this point is such that there is a huge body of literature surrounding it and yet, notwithstanding this, safety culture remains both ill defined and misunderstood (Haukelid, 2008; Reason, 1997) and something of an elusive commodity for organizations. Rao (2007) suggested that one of the most challenging aspects facing organizations in the safety-critical domains is to create and preserve a self-sustaining safety culture; Reason (1997, p. 191) also observed that “few things are so sought after and yet so little understood.”