This article, titled “The nature of safety culture: a review of theory and research,” was authored by F.W. Guldenmund from the Safety Science Group at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. It was published in Safety Science, Volume 34, in 2000, across pages 215–257.
The paper serves as a comprehensive review of the existing literature on safety culture and safety climate, primarily emphasizing applied research within the social psychological or organizational psychological traditions.
Key Aspects of the Article:
- Problem Statement and Lack of Consensus: The author notes that despite widespread acknowledgment of their importance, there has been little consensus over the past two decades regarding the cause, content, and consequences of safety culture and climate. Furthermore, there is an overall lack of models specifying the relationship of these concepts with safety and risk management or with safety performance. Most research has not progressed beyond the stage of face validity, indicating that the concept is still in its early developmental stages.
- Differentiation of Safety Culture and Safety Climate: A central objective of the paper is to differentiate safety culture and safety climate using a general framework based on Schein’s (1992) work on organizational culture.
- This framework distinguishes three levels of organizational culture: basic assumptions, espoused values, and artefacts.
- Safety climate is equated with attitudes, which are found at the level of espoused values. These are generally conceived as a distinct configuration with limited dimensionality, often surveyed through self-administered questionnaires.
- Safety culture is considered the core, comprising the basic assumptions. These underlying convictions or dogmas do not necessarily have to be specifically about safety but explain the attitudes found within an organization. They are often implicit, unconscious, and invisible to members, needing to be deduced from artefacts and espoused values.
- Proposed Framework and Its Layers: The article proposes an integrative framework where safety culture has three layers:
- Basic Assumptions (Core): These are the fundamental, often unconscious, beliefs that permeate the entire organization and explain safety attitudes. Examples of dimensions for these assumptions include the nature of reality and truth, time, space, human nature, human activity, and human relationships.
- Espoused Values/Attitudes (Middle Layer): Operationalized as safety climate, these are the conscious attitudes regarding specific safety objects. Four broad categories of safety attitude objects are suggested: hardware/physical environment, software (e.g., procedures, training), people (e.g., management, supervisors, colleagues), and behavior (e.g., responsibility, safe working, communication).
- Artefacts (Outer Layer): These are the visible manifestations of the culture, such as statements, meetings, inspection reports, dress codes, posters, personal protective equipment, accidents, incidents, and near-misses.
- Research Focus and Utility: The author concludes that safety climate might be considered an alternative safety performance indicator, and research should focus on its scientific validity. More importantly, the assessment of an organization’s basic assumptions is crucial, as they are assumed to be explanatory for its attitudes and provide a deeper understanding for potential safety improvements and preventing unforeseen major accidents. The paper also discusses the importance of the level of aggregation in research, noting that individual measures may not accurately reflect organizational-level attributes without careful consideration of homogeneity and pertinent attitude objects.
Overall, the article aims to bring clarity to the concepts of safety culture and climate by integrating them into a coherent theoretical framework, highlighting past research limitations, and suggesting directions for future scientific inquiry, particularly emphasizing the need to understand the deeper, underlying basic assumptions of an organization.
Reference: Guldenmund, F. W. (2000). The nature of safety culture: a review of theory and research. Safety Science, 34(4), 215–257.
