ABSTRACT
The safety culture of an organization is the product of individual and group values, attitudes, competencies and patterns of behaviour that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of an organization's health and safety programmes. Whilst safety culture is acknowledged as an important concept, its content and consequences have enjoyed little consensus of opinion over the last few decades and an absence of models that specify relationships between culture, safety management and safety performance persists. Dialogue around safety culture has emerged as a popular theme in contemporary scholarship, usually as an answer to accident causation, and also as the silver bullet for performance improvement. In modern times, the term is typically connected with the prevention of accidents, and it enjoys centre stage as an approach to driving sustained performance improvement. Following the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion, the International Atomic Energy Agency identified that the 'poor safety culture' at the plant was the primary cause of the accident.
