ABSTRACT
Despite increasing technological advancement and the strict regulation on occupational safety, the number of accidents and injuries at work is still high. In order to the overall reduction of workplace accidents, workplace safety has been studied from different points of view (Silva et al. 2004), but only in the last decade the promotion of a positive safety culture has been largely regarded as the most important prerequisite for continuous improvement. To this end many models have been proposed which try to identify the complex nature and structure of safety culture. Some of them asserts that accidents stem almost entirely from the system (Deming 1986) and model only professional aspects, others suggest that nearly every accident may be traced to an employee’s unsafe act (Burk et al. 1990) and take into consideration socio-cultural aspects. Nevertheless, most industrial accidents are caused by an interacting system of social and technical forces (Brown et al. 2000). Therefore, a company’s safety culture is based on both technical and social, systemic andpersonal aspects; hence, some socio-technical models have been developed. Most of these models theorize the idea that the characteristics of a single worker directly affect safety, while the characteristics of the system affect safety indirectly, through the behaviour of workers. The pre-eminent socio-technical model was developed by Brown et al. (2000): the study aimed only at analysing the relevant factors of safety culture according to a pre-defined
model, verifying empirically the correlations among these factors.
