Safety culture: transferring theory and evidence ... - Industrial Centre

Behavioural Research in Road Safety: 10th Seminarindustrial contexts, and with few attempts to reconcile underlying frameworks or toconduct meta-analyses across (often) confidential data bases. Accordingly, a combinationof qualitative and quantitative research might be needed first to identify the importantcontext-specific issues in relation to fleet driver safety.However, some lessons are suggested by our review of existing research on safety culture.Inevitably these issues interact with one another, but a first concerns the unit of analysisadopted. Driver behaviour research and intervention tends, for obvious reasons, to focuseither upon the individual driver or engineered solutions that change the driver’senvironment. In considering fleet safety the organisation should be considered as much apart of the ‘environment’ as is the physical layout of roads. Accordingly, attention shouldfocus not only upon the individual driver, but also the attitudes of company managementand line supervisors (who will influence driver behaviour through their own commitmentto safety). An hypothesis here would be that changes in fleet safety attitudes are alreadyunderway in companies and industries where safety has become a key business priority, orwill be easy to instigate in such companies. Likewise, the issue of occupational sub-cultureshighlights the potential for training to cover some of the softer issues, such as attitudestowards violations and the balance to be struck between performance and safety. Finally,mechanisms for organisational learning, such as confidential incident reporting systems,have begun to be taken up in a variety of industries. While such systems are unlikely to beappropriate to every fleet driver context, and are certainly very difficult to instigate(Pidgeon, 1997), with larger organisations they might bring considerable benefits as well ashelping to underline the wider commitment to safety both across industries and withinorganisations that is a part of an effective safety culture.ReferencesACSNI (1993) Advisory Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations: Study Group onHuman Factors. Organizing for Safety. Health and Safety Commission, London.Chappell, S.L. (1994) Using voluntary incident reports for human factors evaluations. InN.A Johnston, N. McDonald and R. Fuller (eds.), Aviation Psychology in Practice. AveburyTechnical Press, Aldershot.Cheyne, A., Cox, S., Oliver, A. and Tomas, J.M. (1998) Modelling safety climate in theprediction of levels of safety activity. Work and Stress, 12, 255-271.Cohen, A. (1977) Factors in successful occupational safety programs. Journal of SafetyResearch, 9(4), 168-178.Cox, S. and Flin, R. (1998) Safety culture: philosopher’s stone or man of straw? Work andStress, 12, 189-201.Flin, R. (1998) Safety condition monitoring: lessons from man-made disasters, Journal ofContingencies and Crisis Management, 6(2), 88-92.Flin, R., Mearns, K., Fleming, M. and Gordon, R. (1996) Risk perception and safety inoffshore workers. Safety Science, 22, 131-145.Free, R. (1994) The Role of Procedural Violations in Railway Accidents. PhD Thesis,University of Manchester.58