Meeting Expectations: A New Model for a Just and Fair Culture

Safety Science, 2016

A 'just culture' aims to respond to anxiety about blame-free approaches on the one hand, and a concern about people's willingness to keep reporting safety-related issues on the other. A just culture sets out the conditions that legitimize managerial intervention in the sanction or restoration of individuals in the organization. In this paper we examine the manifestly important moral and safety issues that a just culture needs to consider. These include substantive justice which prescribes how regulations, rules and procedures themselves are fair and legitimate; procedural justice which sets down processes for determining rule-breaches, offers protections for the accused, and governs who should make such determinations; and restorative justice which aims to restore the status of the individual involved and heal relationships and injuries of victims and the wider community in the wake of an ethical breach. Just culture approaches need to provide such foundations for a genuinely just safety culture, to be conducive to reporting, engagement and safety improvement.

Since the 1990s, the idea that accidents should be reduced to zero is gaining growing acclaim in the fields of road safety and occupational safety and health. As most of the literature on this so-called Zero Accident Vision (ZAV) deals exclusively with its application to road safety, which is a public sector responsibility, there is a need to learn more about the way it is implemented by private companies. This paper reports on a case study into the zero accident approach followed by steel company Tata Steel IJmuiden (the Netherlands). The study suggests that private sector advocates of the ZAV, unlike their public sector counterparts, tend to view safety aspirations and economic considerations as mutually reinforcing. However, it is shown that this harmony model does not entirely hold in practice. The findings also highlight another discrepancy. Characteristic of the ZAV is a systems-theoretic focus on identifying root causes of unsafe situations rather than on individual error and blame. Yet employee behavior appears to be a major target for Tata's safety policy and several managers insist on punishing unsafe behavior. Paradoxically, this punitive tendency seems partly stimulated by and at the same time could hinder the very ambition of eradicating all accidents.

The Royal Institution of Naval Architects Human Factors, 2024

After a disaster, many questions are raised by the public about how the incident could possibly have happened. Weren't there procedures, standards, rules, and laws in place to prevent this? Weren't there safety inspectors who were obligated to protect the public safety? Standards, procedures, rules and laws exist to maintain public safety in our increasingly complex world. But, as many maritime disasters and other incidents painfully demonstrate, they count for little unless there is a Safety Culture to ensure accountability, and that they are applied and enforced. The authors explore the pressures on the members of the safety network to "look the other way" and allow non-compliant and unsafe practices to continue. The pressures on those who try to maintain standards and protect the public safety are explored; the failure of their coworkers and society in general to support them is exposed. Solutions to these issues are proposed.

Health, 2014

One of the problems encountered in work security is non-compliance to work procedures by operators. The consequences of such human behavior are harmful to both the operators and the organization. These consequences are the result of a situational behavior of operators. This article focuses on the perception of work situations in a sample of Algerian workers in oil companies knowing that this perception determines, in large part, the decisions taken by the operators in terms of non-compliance with work procedures.

Occupational health and safety (OHS) law and prosecution comprise the major public institutional response to redressing workplace deaths and serious injuries in Australia. Its main purpose is to deter the recurrence of such fatalities and injuries through the application of sanctions and penalties. Yet international research is inconclusive about how deterrence works in relation to OHS and in what ways it may be effective in preventing workplace deaths and serious injuries. Deterrence in the OHS field is informed primarily by criminological discourse and is generally understood in terms of a cause-and-effect relationship between sanctions and outcomes. In this paper I suggest that an alternative theoretical approach to understanding deterrence in relation to OHS – one that draws on recent sociological thinking about the dynamic organisational processes associated with it – may be more useful. I propose that deterrence in relation to OHS may be better understood as an institutional p...

Journal of Organisation and Human Behaviour, 2022

Better safety cultural measures could save a million lives annually. This article presents a review of the latest academic and field practitioners' literature and examines the critical lapses and insights into safety culture behaviours. Behavioural insights can facilitate boosting a culture of positive safety. The need for a long-term supportive safety culture intervention along with regular retraining , reviews, and reinforcements by the top authorities, as well as heads of departments, is re-emphasised for increasing internal risk controls by employees for saving people from injuries or fatalities. Frequent corporate communications to employees regarding safety culture implementation matters a lot. Safety excellence and business excellence scenarios need to keep human safety ahead of commercial values for gaining organisational sustainability. Occupational health and safety investments are increasingly driven by ESG perspectives. Twelve lapses and insights into safety culture behaviours are summarised in this article, which can be beneficial for organisations. The qualitative data have enriched the concept more clearly, as emphasised by the industry experts.

International Journal of Applied Marketing and Management , 2022

Safety culture is what we call people's safe behaviours. Safety culture is a fast-growing wave in the industry today. Addressing gaps in building a long-term supportive safety culture for companies underlines a set of unresolved questions on behavioural risk management in the industry, and possible solutions. Everyone raises a voice for safety, then safety culture comes into existence and the risk disappears-is it so simple? Most companies delay their HSE decisions till they suffer. Why so? Without inculcating safety as a core corporate value, the industry cannot be considered safe. Behavioural safety culture is a live surveillance on the risks and their spot-correction to ensure that the safety culture building process is active. Safety culture behaviour is necessary to overcome incidents and accidents at the work sites. Behavioural safety education for one and all is the safety culture being addressed the most. Ideologies on safety cultures vary across the industries in terms of practices. The present article dwelt on identifying the unresolved critical questions on behavioural safety supportive culture implementation in the industry, and the possible solutions. The data were collected from 603 industry professionals who were the study participants. The sampling method was a non-random convenience sampling. A set of ten themes of research findings reflected upon critical issues, such as basic questions on long-term safety cultures; reactive safety culture; collective voice and leadership for at-risk behaviours; religion, spirituality, and festivities for safety at sites; implementation of safety with a consideration for others; features of companies not empowering their workforce for performing safety implementation; competency gap among the safety professionals; the major roadblocks in HSE decision-making; the spot-implementation of behaviour-based safety (BBS) approach by top leaders; and myriad factors to advance the success of a long-term supportive safety culture. Fast-tracking supportive safety culture at sites would mean the next level of hard work.

Law <html_ent glyph="@amp;" ascii="&amp;"/> Policy, 2005

Man-made disasters usually lead to the tightening of safety regulations, because rule breaking is seen as a major cause of them. This reaction is based on the assumptions that the safety rules are good and that the rule-breakers are wrong. The reasons the personnel of a coke factory gave for breaking rules raise doubt about the tenability of these assumptions. It is unlikely that this result would have been achieved on the basis of a disaster evaluation, or high-reliability theory. In both approaches, knowledge of the consequences of human conduct hinders an unprejudiced judgement about where the blame for rule breaking lies.

Risk Analysis VIII, 2012

The human consequences of occupational accidents in Algeria are multiples of their action on the profitability and the added value, knowing that the company is the employee's home and the damage of each may affect the whole. Moreover, understanding and applying concepts of risk management in their Anglo-Saxon sense is completely absent in our companies. Preventive measures are still insufficient, especially for the protection of workers who are often left on their own. This results in an uneven maturity of companies, different strategies considered and dissimilar organizational choices. Of the more than 50,000 accidents/year that have been recorded in Algerian companies, between 750 and 800 of those accidents have caused deaths. The number of days lost that are automatically compensated is 14 10 5. These costs are exorbitant for the whole of society and even more so for the companies themselves (the continuing rise of absenteeism, disruption of ongoing work and lost production, etc...). Conscious of the importance of industrial safety control for the future of our industrial heritage, we covet raising employees' and employers' awareness on the importance of all issues raised by technological risks within companies. Everything has to be done in order to avoid an accident which breaks or handicaps a human life; the objective of this paper. Instantly, everything has to be done to ensure the means to provide occupational health and make the industrial action daily to ensure the safety of its personnel in different companies or even in each workplace. Thus, a permanent anticipation of work accidents and occupational diseases can therefore be reached and to develop a permanent and sustainable culture of prevention in companies. So we hope that prevention is on Risk Analysis VIII 405

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000

Research has approached the topic of safety in organizations from a number of different perspectives. On the one hand, psychological research on safety climate gives evidence for a range of organizational factors that predict safety across organizations. On the other hand, organizational learning theorists view safety as a dynamic problem in which organizations must learn from mistakes. Here, we synthesize these two streams of research by incorporating key organizational factors from the safety climate literature into a dynamic simulation model that also includes the possibility for learning. Analysis of simulation results sheds insight into the nature of reliability and confirms the dangers of over-reliance on 'single loop learning' as a mechanism for controlling safety behaviors. Special emphasis is placed on strategies that managers might use to encourage learning and prevent erosion in safety behaviors over time. response to this argument, others have argued instead that organizations, including those in high hazard industries, can be designed and can learn to undertake difficult tasks with reliability (Roberts, 1990; Weick, 1987). Roberts (1990) defines "high reliability organizations" and suggests several strategies that these organizations use to overcome the deficiencies cited by Perrow, including culture, redundancy, continuous training, and organizational design. Weick (1987) further argues that reliability can be developed through a culture of "storytelling" that encourages the exchange of rich and varied information through face to face communication. Social Psychology Consistent with this second view, there is also a rich literature in social psychology that identifies characteristics of organizations that promote safety. Although the earliest psychological research on occupational safety emphasizes either human error or technical failure as the source of accidents, organizational factors are now widely recognized as having a high importance (Clarke, 2000). A substantial portion of this work, beginning with Zohar's (1980) influential study, draws on the notion of "safety climate" to explain the behavior of individuals with regard to safety. Zohar defines climate as "perceptions that employees share about their work environment… that serve as a frame of reference for guiding appropriate and adaptive task behaviors (pg. 96)." Climate is hypothesized to mediate the relationship between a number of organizational characteristics, including management commitment to safety, the openness of communication links, and the stability of the workforce, and safety behavior. Thus, beyond the propensity of individuals to engage in safe acts independently, this research introduces the notion of a "shared cognition regarding safety" that can be established within organizations (pg. 101). Building on Zohar's original work, a number of studies have developed measures for safety climate and verified the relationship between this construct and the safety behaviors of individuals within an organization. Examples include Griffin & Neal (2000), Brown & Holmes (1986) in manufacturing, Hofmann & Stetzer (1996) in a chemical processing plant, and Mearns et al (1998) in a study of oil and gas production. In addition, Zohar (2000) extends this construct by showing that it applies to groups, in addition to organizations as a whole, through the actions of supervisors. Defining the organizational factors that predict safety climate has also received a lot of attention, with a focus especially on management commitment (