1Chapter 2 Organizational Influences on Safety Climate in Guanxi-Oriented Cultures

Researchers have recently recognized organizational factors as one of the important latent causes of failures in large, complex systems. Hollnagel & Woods (2005) have pointed out that 30-40% of incidents and accidents of large-scale complex systems relate to organizational factors. A series of empirical studies have found that organizational factors are linked to employee safety behavior (Neal, Griffin, & Hart, 2000; Seo, 2005; Tomas, Melia, & Oliver, 1999) as well as to organizational safety outcomes such as injuries, incidents, and accidents (Siu, Philips, & Leung, 2004; Varonen & Mattila, 2000). The ways in which organizational factors affect safety in high-risk industries have therefore become a critical issue in safety management (Flin et al., 2000).