Is safety culture in differing organizations the same thing? a comparison of safety culture measures in three organizations

Abstract

Safety culture is a complex issue; while there would seem to be a consensus about what it means in general terms, there is still no agreement concerning the actual number of its constituent factors, which range from 2 to 19 but almost always include management responsibility, job satisfaction, individual responsibility, leadership style and communication, commitment, risk awareness, and risk taking. Most research has concentrated on industry sectors where the salience of safety is high and it is possible that safety attitudes may differ in those industries where safety has a lower salience. There is also the possibility that to some extent safety culture factors are method-bound—the factors are as much a product of the items in the scale as they are of an underlying factor structure. This study uses two measures of safety culture and considers the factor structures for three industry groups—one in the nuclear industry, one in chemicals, and one in manufacturing. In the nuclear and manufacturing companies where the questions were very similar, similar factor structures were found and for the other scale, the factors resembled the published factors for that scale. However, large grade and company differences were found in the factor scores, suggesting that differences in safety culture are more a product of grade of employee and the salience of safety in the company they work for than of the measures used. Results suggest that there are three elements to safety culture: one a general set of attitudes and the others more specifically related to the company culture and the salience of safety in the organization.