Safety climate and culture: a brief tutorial and review of the current state of research, with an emphasis on the inter-relationships with safety management systems.

Details

• Personal Author:
  Cunningham T ; Garza E ; Loflin M ; Menendez CC ; Pratt S ; Schneider S ; Sharf T ; Taylor JA ; Wirth O
• Corporate Authors:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Safety Climate and Culture Working Group
• Description:
  The terms "safety climate" and "safety culture" have received - and continue to receive - increasing attention in the literature addressing safe work processes and safety management. Assessments of safety climate have been shown to be reliable and valid leading indicators of safety at work (both positive and negative, e.g., Zohar, 2010). One real-world problem is that failures in "safety culture" (most often) and "safety climate" (sometimes) are blamed for major catastrophes in firefighting, oil drilling and exploration, transportation, nuclear power, and even in bio-safety at CDC (e.g., Frieden, 2014; Guldenmund, 2000, and 2010; NIOSH, 2013). This short tutorial will review the inter-related concepts of safety culture and safety climate in relation to safety management systems, socio-technical systems, and the overall organization of work in hazardous work environments. We will provide a very brief introduction to safety climate and culture definitions, research status, and challenges. We will also connect safety climate and culture to safety management. Perhaps most important, we will focus on examples of safety culture in the fire service and in construction with suggestions for tools to improve both safety culture and safety management. Following this working group's charge, we will summarize: 1) competing definitions of safety climate and culture, including the similarities linking these two terms: although there are conceptual and empirical differences between "culture" and "climate," one of the principal differences is that term "climate" is used primarily by researchers, while "culture is used by workers, supervisors, top-level managers, and by safety professionals, i.e. just about everyone else; 2) current status of research connecting safety climate to safe work practices: safety climate has been clearly established as a leading indicator of safety and safe work practices in hazardous work environments; 3) current challenges and key questions in safety climate research: while generic measures of safety climate have been validated, the issue of industry specific measures and the proper context for safety climate measurement are just two of the many challenges facing researchers; 4) safety culture within the fire service, a case study example from DSR: theoretical discussions of safety culture do not always translate easily or directly onto the fireground. This presentation will provide examples from firefighter fatality investigations to keep the more theoretical discussions of safety climate and culture grounded in the real world, and to provide an example of a successful model of safety management: the Incident Command System; 5) a brief introduction to safety management systems: professionals distinguish between process and worker safety management; this presentation will suggest that from the perspective of the worker in the hazardous environment with respect to safety climate, such distinctions are unimportant. All elements of safety and safe work practices must function well, and together must contribute to the work group's perception of safety climate; 6) competing models linking safety climate to safety management (and socio-technical) systems - placing safety climate into its proper context: a coherent and consistent model will connect safety climate to work group and organizational-level productivity and safety management systems; 7) current guides and checklists to help improve safe work practices and safety climate in hazardous industries: results from the CWPR-NIOSH workshop on safety culture and climate in construction, along with contributions from four focused workgroups regarding: 1) worker participation, 2) integration of safety, 3) supervisor training, and 4) incident investigation.
• Subjects:
  Accidents, Occupational Air Pollutants, Occupational Air Pollution, Indoor Environmental Exposure Environmental Monitoring Environmental Pollution Hazardous Substances Occupational Health Safety Spectrum Analysis Vehicle Emissions

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• Keywords:
  Fire-fighting Hazards Nuclear-power-plants Oil-refineries Safety-climate Safety-measures Safety-practices Surveillance Training Transportation-industry Work-environment Work-practices Workers

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• Publisher:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Document Type:
  Text
• Genre:
  Abstract
• Place as Subject:
  Ohio ; OSHA Region 3 ; OSHA Region 5 ; West Virginia
• CIO:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
• Division:
  DSR - Division of Safety Research ; EID - Education and Information Division ; DART - Division of Applied Research and Technology ; HELD - Health Effects Laboratory Division ; OD - Office of the Director
• Topic:
  Workplace Safety & Health
• Location:
  North America
• Pages in Document:
  102-103
• NIOSHTIC Number:
  nn:20047370
• Citation:
  National Occupational Injury Research Symposium 2015, (NOIRS 2015), May 19-21, 2015, Kingwood, West Virginia. Morgantown, WV: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Public Health Service, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 2015 May; :102-103
• Federal Fiscal Year:
  2015
• Peer Reviewed:
  False
• Source Full Name:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Collection(s):
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:2cdf0585169d7f91347f59707d19fd1f978b7f66b467a361499cb9354d437e095f937ba0c6c4415c4d1a8e04a0f1fd08906bb7c3fc53cc53f42619b5553a7fc6
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/181671/cdc_181671_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 1.00 MB ]