Safety Culture - Role of Safety Culture in Incident Investigation

Role of Safety Culture in Incident Investigation

Although there is some uncertainty and ambiguity in defining safety culture, there is no uncertainty over the relevance or significance of the concept (Yule, 2003). Mearns et al., (2003) stated that “safety culture is an important concept that forms the environment within which individual safety attitudes develop and persist and safety behaviours are promoted”. Incidents like Piper Alpha and Kings Cross station have raised awareness of the effect of organisational, managerial and human factors on safety outcomes. As several reports of major disasters have identified, safety culture is a factor that decisively affected the outcome (Reason, 1990). Such reports include the Piper Alpha oil-platform explosion (Cullen, 1990), the 1987 Kings Cross underground station fire (Fennel, 1988), and the sinking of the MS Herald of Free Enterprise passenger ferry (Sheen, 1987). Although definitions vary there is a consensus towards safety culture being a proactive stance to safety (Lee and Harrison, 2000).

Over the years, a lot of attention has focused on the causes of occupational incidents (Haslam et al. 2005). When incidents occur in the workplace it is important to understand what factors (human, technical, organizational) may have contributed to the outcome in order to avoid similar incidents in the future. Through developing an understanding of why and how incidents occur, appropriate methods for incident prevention can be developed (Williamson and Feyer 2002). In the past, any attempt to improve workplace safety or to control workplace risks has focussed on technical aspects (i.e. design of safer systems) and on the direct influence of human behaviour (i.e. operator error) (Gadd and Collins 2002). However, a number of major disasters have brought attention to the impact of organizational factors (i.e. policies and procedures) on the outcome of safety performance, with numerous inquiries identifying safety culture as having a definitive impact on the outcome of the disaster (Reason, 1990). Such incidents as Chernobyl, King's Cross, and Piper Alpha are all examples of how organizational and human factors can have an impact on safety performance. Following the Piper Alpha explosion Lord Cullen said that, “it is essential to create a corporate atmosphere or culture in which safety is understood to be and is accepted as, the number one priority” (Cullen, 1990, p. 300). In that same year a report into the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster identified numerous “flawed” decisions on behalf of NASA and Thiokol management as contributing factors to the disaster.

With every major disaster a large amount of resources are set aside in order to establish exactly what factors contributed to the outcome of the event. These inquiries pay particular attention to detail and prove to be an invaluable source of information in identifying factors that “make organizations vulnerable to failures” (Gadd and Collins, 2006 p. 3). From such inquiries, there are some clear observations that can be drawn, for example, organizational accidents are not a result of ‘operator error’, chance environmental or technical failures alone. Rather, the disasters are a result of a breakdown in the organization’s policies and procedures that were established to deal with safety. The Piper Alpha disaster, for example, was a fatal combination of failure of individuals to perform their duties, breakdown in documented systems and managerial failure.

There is now a move to apply the concept of safety culture at the individual level. Mearns et al., (2003) highlight that although safety culture was a concept originally used to describe the inadequacies of safety management that result in major disasters, it is interesting that the concept is now being applied to explain accidents at the individual level. As worker’s behaviour is influenced by the safety culture of an organization, such culture could become a determinant of worker injury involvement (Glendon et al., 2006). Although the overall culture of an organization may have an impact on the behaviour of employees, much research has focused on the impact of more localised factors (i.e. supervisors, interpretation of safety policies) in the specific culture of individual workplaces. Glendon et al., (2006) refer to this as the “Local safety climate, which is more susceptible to transition and change” (p. 367). This would also suggest that safety climate operates on a different level than safety culture. Though Mearns et al. (2006) emphasize, “The validity of the safety culture concept with regard to individual accidents is yet to be ascertained” (p. 643).