An evaluation of a new instrument to measure organisational safety culture values and practices

Artificial neural network in soft HR performance management: new insights from a large organizational dataset

Purpose

This study investigates whether the artificial neural network approach, when used on a large organizational soft HR performance dataset, results in a better (R2/RMSE) model compared to the linear regression. With the use of predictive modelling, a more informed base for managerial decision making within soft HR performance management is offered.

Design/methodology/approach

The study builds on a dataset (n > 43 k) stemming from an annual employee MNC survey. It covers several soft HR performance drivers and outcomes (such as engagement, satisfaction and others) that either have evidence of a dual-role nature or non-linear relationships. This study applies the framework for artificial neural network analysis in organization research (Scarborough and Somers, 2006).

Findings

The analysis reveals a substantial artificial neural network model performance (R2 > 0.75) with an excellent fit statistic (nRMSE <0.10) and all drivers have the same relative importance (RMI [0.102; 0.125]). This predictive analysis revealed that the organization has to increase six of the drivers, keep two on the same level and decrease one.

Originality/value

Up to date, this study uses the largest dataset in soft HR performance management. Additionally, the predictive results reveal that specific target values lay below the current levels to achieve optimal performance.

The Safer Culture Framework: An Application to Healthcare Based on a Multi-Industry Review of Safety Culture Literature

BACKGROUND

Errors and preventable harm to patients remain regrettably common and expensive in healthcare. Improvement requires transforming the culture of the healthcare industry to put a greater emphasis on safety. Safety culture involves holding collective attitudes, values, and behaviors that prioritize safety. The Safer Culture framework, previously established through a narrative review of literature in multiple industries, provides a consensus on what impacts safety culture, how it manifests in behavior, and how it influences safety-related outcomes.

METHODS

Through a theoretical review, we validate, refine, and provide nuance to this framework for the development of safety culture in healthcare contexts. To accomplish this, we conceptually map existing dimensions pulled through the literature onto our Safer Culture framework.

RESULTS

A total of 360 articles were reviewed. We present specific elements for each dimension in our framework and apply the dimension to healthcare contexts.

CONCLUSION

We provide an evidence-based and comprehensive framework that can be used by patient safety leaders and researchers to guide the evaluation of safety culture and develop interventions to foster patient safety culture and improve patient safety outcomes.

Synergetic effect of safety culture and safety climate on safety performance in SMEs: does transformation leadership have a moderating role?

Objectives. In developing countries, health and safety is not given importance especially in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Incidents in health and safety are continuously increasing. The major reason is a lack of workplace safety culture. Secondly, enterprises lack resources, therefore it becomes hard for them to provide safety climate. Along with safety climate and safety culture, the behavior of leadership plays a significant role toward safety performance. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to analyze the moderating role of leadership for gaining safety performance through safety culture and safety climate. Methods. For the said purpose, the authors collected data from laborers and managers. A structured questionnaire was adopted and, after ensuring the reliability, structural equation modeling was applied. Results. The findings revealed that safety culture and safety climate both have a significant impact over safety performance; however, transformational leadership only moderates the relationship between safety culture and safety performance. Conclusions. Identification of the moderating role of transformational leadership is a significant contribution in social cognitive theory. Future researchers are also guided to identify the same link for large industries of developing countries.

Determining the safety culture in a gun factory in Turkey: A fuzzy approach

Safety culture is a very complex phenomenon due to its intangible nature. It is tough to measure and express it with numerical values, as there is no simple indicator to measure it. This paper presents a fuzzy inference system that measures the safety culture. First of all, a safety culture assessment questionnaire is developed by utilizing related literature. The initial questionnaire had 29 items. The questionnaire is applied to 259 employees within the gun manufacturing factory. After making an exploratory factor analysis, the questionnaire is based on five factors with 25 items. The safety culture indicators are defined as; safety follow-up audit reporting, employees’ self-awareness, operational safety commitment, management’s safety commitment, safety orientedness. Normality, reliability, and correlation analysis are performed. Then a fuzzy model is constructed with five inputs and one output. The inputs are the five factors mentioned above, and the output generated is the safety culture result, which is between 0-1. The presented fuzzy model produces reliable results indicating the safety culture level from the employees’ eyes. Beyond exploring the employees’ safety culture, the proposed model can easily be understood by the practitioners from various sectors. Furthermore, the model is straightforward to customize for various fields of industry.

Safety Culture: An Integration of Existing Models and a Framework for Understanding Its Development

OBJECTIVE

This study reviews theoretical models of organizational safety culture to uncover key factors in safety culture development.

BACKGROUND

Research supports the important role of safety culture in organizations, but theoretical progress has been stunted by a disjointed literature base. It is currently unclear how different elements of an organizational system function to influence safety culture, limiting the practical utility of important research findings.

METHOD

We reviewed existing models of safety culture and categorized model dimensions by the proposed function they serve in safety culture development. We advance a framework grounded in theory on organizational culture, social identity, and social learning to facilitate convergence toward a unified approach to studying and supporting safety culture.

RESULTS

Safety culture is a relatively stable social construct, gradually shaped over time by multilevel influences. We identify seven enabling factors that create conditions allowing employees to adopt safety culture values, assumptions, and norms; and four behaviors used to enact them. The consequences of these enacting behaviors provide feedback that may reinforce or revise held values, assumptions, and norms.

CONCLUSION

This framework synthesizes information across fragmented conceptualizations to clearly depict the dynamic nature of safety culture and specific drivers of its development. We suggest that safety culture development may depend on employee learning from behavioral outcomes, conducive enabling factors, and consistency over time.

APPLICATION

This framework guides efforts to understand and develop safety culture in practice and lends researchers a foundation for advancing theory on the complex, dynamic processes involved in safety culture development.

Frequency of Self-Reported Concussion Amongst Professional and Semi-Professional Footballers in Ireland During the 2014 Season: a Cross-Sectional Study

BACKGROUND

This paper examines the occupational risk of concussion amongst professional and semi-professional footballers in Ireland during the 2014 League of Ireland season. As part of a broader nationally representative study examining occupational safety and health (OSH) awareness amongst professional footballers, this empirical quantitative study, utilising a convenience sample is the first and largest investigation of the frequency of, and attitudes towards, concussion and concussion reporting amongst Irish senior professional and semi-professional footballers.

METHODS

A census survey using an anonymous questionnaire was provided to available League of Ireland clubs between March and May 2015. Permission to access players was provided by the Professional Footballers Association of Ireland. This convenience sample was determined by club availability in relation to match fixtures. Participation by the footballers was voluntary. At the time, there were 250 professional and semi-professional players within the League available to participate.

RESULTS

A total of 149 footballers participated in the study. Sixty percent of the participants were employed on a semi-professional basis and the majority of all participants were aged between 18 and 30. 15.7% of the participants reported having received a concussion in the 2014 season with semi-professional players having a noticeably higher (though not significant) reporting rate. Analysis indicated that there was a significant association between playing position and concussion reporting with defenders having the greater odds of reporting a concussion than other playing positions. Professional and semi-professional footballers have a relatively equal risk of receiving a concussion.

CONCLUSION

This research is the first major investigation of the self-reported frequency of, and attitudes towards, concussion amongst Irish senior professional and semi-professional footballers. The results have important implications for coaches, clinicians, parents, players and national governing bodies. Further research is needed to ascertain whether professional footballers perceive concussion as an occupational risk, and whether they appreciate that accepting such risks can have long-term implications for health.

Assessing Reliability and Validity of an Instrument for Measuring Resilience Safety Culture in Sociotechnical Systems

Background

Safety culture, acting as the oil necessary in an efficient safety management system, has its own weaknesses in the current conceptualization and utilization in practice. As a new approach, resilience safety culture (RSC) has been proposed to reduce these weaknesses and improve safety culture; however, it requires a valid and reliable instrument to be measured. This study aimed at evaluating the reliability and validity of such an instrument in measuring the RSC in sociotechnical systems.

Methods

The researchers designed an instrument based on resilience engineering principles and safety culture as the first instrument to measure the RSC. The RSC instrument was distributed among 354 staff members from 12 units of an anonymous petrochemical plant through hand delivery. Content validity, confirmatory, and exploratory factor analysis were used to examine the construct validity, and Cronbach alpha and test-retest were employed to examine the reliability of the instrument.

Results

The results of the content validity index and content validity ratio were calculated as 0.97 and 0.83, respectively. The explanatory factor analysis showed 14 factors with 68.29% total variance and 0.88 Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin index. The results were also confirmed with confirmatory factor analysis (relative Chi-square = 2453.49, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation = 0.04). The reliability of the RSC instrument, as measured by internal consistency, was found to be satisfactory (Cronbach α = 0.94). The results of test-retest reliability was r = 0.85, p < 0.001.

Conclusion

The results of the study suggest that the measure shows acceptable validity and reliability.

Diagnosis of poor safety culture as a major shortcoming in OHSAS 18001-certified companies

The evaluation of safety performance in occupational health and safety assessment series (OHSAS) 18001-certified companies provides useful information about the quality of the management system. A certified organization should employ an adequate level of safety management and a positive safety culture to achieve a satisfactory safety performance. The present study conducted in six manufacturing companies: three OHSAS 18001-certified, and three non-certified to assess occupational health and safety (OHS) as well as OHSAS 18001 practices. The certified companies had a better OHS practices compared with the non-certified companies. The certified companies slightly differed in OHS and OHSAS 18001 practices and one of the certified companies had the highest activity rates for both practices. The results indicated that the implemented management systems have not developed and been maintained appropriately in the certified companies. The in-depth analysis of the collected evidence revealed shortcomings in safety culture improvement in the certified companies. This study highlights the importance of safety culture to continuously improve the quality of OHSAS 18001 and to properly perform OHS/OHSAS 18001 practices in the certified companies.

Does the concept of safety culture help or hinder systems thinking in safety?

The concept of safety culture has become established in safety management applications in all major safety-critical domains. The idea that safety culture somehow represents a "systemic view" on safety is seldom explicitly spoken out, but nevertheless seem to linger behind many safety culture discourses. However, in this paper we argue that the "new" contribution to safety management from safety culture never really became integrated with classical engineering principles and concepts. This integration would have been necessary for the development of a more genuine systems-oriented view on safety; e.g. a conception of safety in which human, technological, organisational and cultural factors are understood as mutually interacting elements. Without of this integration, researchers and the users of the various tools and methods associated with safety culture have sometimes fostered a belief that "safety culture" in fact represents such a systemic view about safety. This belief is, however, not backed up by theoretical or empirical evidence. It is true that safety culture, at least in some sense, represents a holistic term-a totality of factors that include human, organisational and technological aspects. However, the departure for such safety culture models is still human and organisational factors rather than technology (or safety) itself. The aim of this paper is to critically review the various uses of the concept of safety culture as representing a systemic view on safety. The article will take a look at the concepts of culture and safety culture based on previous studies, and outlines in more detail the theoretical challenges in safety culture as a systems concept. The paper also presents recommendations on how to make safety culture more systemic.

Factors that influence safety culture in construction

Although there is no consensus on how to define the safety culture of an organisation, the concept is now recognised as an essential contributor to improved occupational safety performance in construction. Indeed, the subject of safety culture has attracted considerable attention in the literature in recent years. The health and safety culture in an organisation is determined by the social and psychological relationships in the workplace. Some view safety culture as a management issue but so fuzzy to the extent that it cannot be measured or reliably changed. This paper aims to explore and to make explicit some of the key factors that influence safety culture in construction. The concepts of organisational culture and climate are firstly discussed. The concept of health and safety culture is then evaluated including the factors that influence it; its assessment and measurement methods. The results of interviews with site safety managers of construction companies that exhibit strong safety cultures are reported. The objective of this work was to determine what works for them. The results reveal that the factors that contribute to positive and negative safety cultures in construction can be grouped into six categories: organisation factors, individual factors, team factors, job design factors, management factors and supervisory factors.

The effect of safety climate on seafarers' safety behaviors in container shipping

This study empirically examined safety climate and its effects on safety behaviors from seafarers' perceptions in the container shipping context. Research hypotheses were formulated and tested using survey data collected from 608 seafarers working on 124 vessels belonging to 13 of the top 20 global container carriers. A structural equation model was used to examine the effect of safety climate dimensions, namely, safety policy, perceived supervisor safety behavior, and safety management, on safety behavior. The results revealed a positive association between safety climate and seafarers' safety behavior. The contribution of the study findings to the development of safety climate theory and their managerial implications for vessel safety in shipping operations are discussed.

(Mis)understanding Safety Culture and Its Relationship to Safety Management

Although the concept of safety culture was coined in relation to major accidents like Chernobyl and Piper Alpha, it has been embraced by the safety community at large as a cause for unsafe practice. In this article, three approaches to safety culture are discussed in terms of their underlying concepts of culture and organizational culture. Culture is an intangible, fuzzy concept encompassing acquired assumptions that is shared among the members of a group and that provides meaning to their perceptions and actions and those of others. The basic assumptions that form the essence of a culture are shared, yet tacit, convictions, which manifest themselves subtly in the visible world. As applied by safety researchers, the culture concept is deprived of much of its depth and subtlety, and is morphed into a grab bag of behavioral and other visible characteristics, without reference to the meaning these characteristics might actually have, and often infused with normative overtones. By combining the three approaches, we can resurrect the notion of safety culture and strengthen its analytical potential in understanding the development and implementation of safety management systems.