Safety cultivation

Subtitle:an integrative approach to improve organisational safety culture

A plethora of scientific and practical research has already been conducted in the field of safety culture, but still no consensus has been reached on its definition and content. In general, safety culture research lacks a transdisciplinary approach. Furthermore, although the concept of safety culture is characterised by complexity, the safety culture concept has been characterised by reductionism, where models and theories simplify the concept in order to better grasp it, leading to confined approaches. This research wants to contribute to the field of safety culture research by developing an integrative theoretical and practical framework for organisational safety culture using a transdisciplinary approach, and by taking into account the needs of the work field. The developed integrative theoretical framework acknowledges the multifacetedness of the concept safety culture by taking into account technological, organisational or contextual, and human aspects as interacting and interrelating elements. The theoretical framework has been converted into an applied assessment instrument, namely the ‘Integrated Safety Culture Assessment’, abbreviated ISCA, where the ‘assessment’ refers to its practical usability. Within ISCA, an important dichotomy is present, namely non-observable (subjective) factors, and observable (objective) factors constituting the organisational safety culture. Questionnaires are used to map or ‘diagnose’ the non-observable part of ISCA, i.e. the perceptual and psychological domain of safety culture. To measure the observable part of ISCA, an approach to compose company-specific safety indicators has been developed. Key in this approach is the sequence of follow-up when assessing indicators, and the focus on quality rather than quantity. By using company-specific safety indicators, the specific needs and context of a company is taken into account. The practical rendition of ISCA can be used to map the safety culture of an organisation (by a quantitative scan using the aforementioned questionnaires and safety indicators, followed by a qualitative in-depth analysis) and to formulate recommendations in this regard, with the ultimate goal of bringing about a change towards a positive safety culture. When using ISCA, safety culture is assessed in an integrative way, by using a variety of research methods involving the entire organisation (when determining the safety culture, but also when validating results and when formulating and implementing improvement strategies). The output of the doctoral research has been developed in close collaboration with the key stakeholders as regards safety culture, namely safety professionals, the companies and their employees.

Publication year:2023

Keywords:Doctoral thesis

Accessibility:Open