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Safety Culture in the Mining Industry
Published in Debi Prasad Tripathy, Mine Safety Science and Engineering, 2019
Building a strong culture of safety in an organization requires active leadership from the top down. A safety culture is one where everyone in an organization is part of the group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behavior that determine the commitment to health and safety management. Safety managers and other organization leaders need to demonstrate a positive attitude toward health and safety in order to have a cascading effect on fellow employees and staff. By taking a proactive approach to safety, managers set the example for employees and positively influence safety culture. Having a strong culture of safety is one where all levels of the organization are visibly committed to safety. Everyone takes ownership of the organization’s health and safety. Safety managers play a key role in helping achieve this (Safetypros, 2016).
Safety Culture
Published in Charles D. Reese, Occupational Safety and Health, 2017
Safety culture is a concept defined at a group level or higher that refers to the shared values among all the group or company, corporation, or organization members. Safety culture is concerned with formal safety issues in an organization and is closely related to, but not restricted to, the management and supervisory system. Safety culture emphasizes the contribution from everyone at every level of the organization. The safety culture of the business entity has an impact on all members of the workforce’s behavior at work. Safety culture is usually reflected in the relationship between the reward system and safety performance. A positive safety culture is indicative of an organization’s willingness to develop, change, and learn from errors, incidents, and accidents. Safety culture is ingrained, enduring, stable, and very resistant to change.
Emerging Challenges
Published in Naosuke Itoigawa, Bernhard Wilpert, Babette Fahlbruch, Emerging Demands for the Safety of Nuclear Power Operations, 2004
Although practitioners have developed several scales to assess safety culture (e.g., Cox & Cheyne, 2000; Ostrom et al., 1993), many researchers (e.g., Mearns & Flin, 1999; Zohar, 1980) have questioned the validity of these scales from a theoretical standpoint and have also questioned their ability to measure safety culture. Referring to the concepts of organizational culture versus organizational climate, they have argued that there is also a distinction between the concepts of safety culture and safety climate. Safety culture is the values, beliefs, attitudes, norms, and underlying assumptions that employees hold about the safety of an organization. It is a complex, enduring trait that is difficult to measure. Safety climate describes employees’ perception about and attitudes toward the current work environment (Zohar, 1980), but it also provides a
A macroergonomics perspective for exploring safety culture factors: a qualitative content analysis approach
Published in International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, 2022
Haji Omid Kalteh, Hamidreza Mokarami
Today, safety culture is widely recognized as an essential element in organizations for preventing accidents. However, researchers have not agreed on the content of safety culture and its effects on the organization. Murphy et al. [25] argue that safety climate is known as a measurable section of safety culture. In many previous studies, safety culture and safety climate dimensions are limited to identifying weak safety outcomes in the organization because a limited number of items are tried to cover a large part of the safety issues. Many of these items are common criteria for safety culture scales, which are similarly used in many industries. The purpose of the present study was to develop factors related to the safety measures based on a macroergonomics-inspired theoretical framework. In recent years, the use of macroergonomics for safety management system evaluation has been expanding [46]. In this regard, this relationship has gone so far that some researchers have introduced the next generation of macroergonomics in relation to safety categories such as safety climate [25]. Researchers with a macroergonomics approach can look at safety, especially safety culture and safety climate, from a new perspective. In fact, the use of the macroergonomics approach allows structures of the system to be studied from the perspective of human–organization and technology–organization interfaces [18,47].
The relationships between the use of smart mobile technology, safety knowledge and propensity to follow safe practices at work
Published in International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, 2021
Andrzej Jan Olak, Irena Hejduk, Waldemar Karwowski, Przemyslaw Tomczyk, Jan Fazlagić, Paweł Gac, Hubert Hejduk, Sylvia Sobolewska, Erman Çakıt, Omar A. Alrehaili
Three interrelated concepts of safety culture include behavioral, psychological and situational aspects [15]. The behavioral (organizational) aspect focuses on the behaviors of employees, activities and actions related to safety within the organization, i.e., what ‘people do’ in an organization regarding safety. The organizational context of safety culture can be measured using a set of indicators, including engagement, managerial commitment and employees’ empowerment, awards and a reporting system [16]. The psychological aspect considers ‘what people feel’ about safety and its management at all levels of the organization. Worker attitudes and perceptions are important aspects of corporate safety culture [17]. The situational (or corporate) aspect relates to a corporation’s policies, instructions, procedures, management system and communication flow, and explains ‘what an organization obtains’ [18].
Assessment of safety culture among job positions in high-rise construction: a hybrid fuzzy multi criteria decision-making (FMCDM) approach
Published in International Journal of Injury Control and Safety Promotion, 2018
In contrast to these studies, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, a comprehensive evaluation of safety culture among construction job positions has not been performed to date; thus, this paper attempts to contribute to the literature by offering a comprehensive framework for assessment of safety culture among job positions of high-rise construction projects. The following points in brief try to express the benefits of assessing safety culture among job positions within the construction industry: Focusing on safety culture differences between job positions enables us to identify job positions with low levels of safety culture, and consequently, helps us in promoting safety awareness in construction jobsites. Also safety culture focuses on reducing employees’ unsafe behaviours and reducing fatal and non-fatal injuries in the workplace.This assessment can assist jobsite safety professionals in predicting the level of safety of each job position. Such a proactive analysis can be integrated with (and can enrich) the occupational risk assessment (ORA) procedure.