ABSTRACT
Organisational climate is based on an aggregation of employees’ perceptions of their experiences within an organisation (Dawson et al., 2008). Safety climate, as a term was initially used by Zohar (1980) to describe attitudes towards safety, and was derived from earlier work on organisational climates. Typically safety climate is explored through questionnaires exploring attitudes and perceptions regarding safety; it is a statistical construction of perceptions held in an organisation regarding safety and is a way to summarise these (Rousseau, 1988). Cox and Flin (1998) in a review of academic papers on the issues stated that the terms safety culture and safety climate are used interchangeably to refer to similar concepts. Safety culture, as a phrase, was first used by the International Atomic Energy
Authority to describe the issues at Chernobyl at the time of their major incident (IAEA, 1986). The interest in culture arose in response to a realisation that organisational structure (i.e. the roles and their relationships, rules and procedures) was limited in achieving an organisation’s health and safety goals. Hence the formal systems should prevent accidents occurring, for example by prioritising resource allocation, assessing training needs, adopting risk assessment methodologies and choosing tolerable risk criteria. HSE stated that the explicit and implicit goal of a
safety management system is the development of a positive safety culture (HSE, 1991). This reflects the understanding that safety management systems only work if individuals are motivated to comply and conform with the organisation’s systems, which is where the need to understand the impact of safety culture arose. HSC (1993) defined safety culture as:
“the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behaviour that determine commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organisation’s health and safety management. Organisations with a positive safety culture are characterised by communications founded on mutual trust, by shared perceptions of the importance of safety and by confidence in the efficacy of preventive measures.”
