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Our beliefs shape our focus and efforts, ultimately determining our outcomes. So, when it comes to safety culture, where do you stand? Have you, like me, encountered vigorous debates questioning the very existence of safety culture?
The deniers who say there is no such thing as safety culture contend that it is a nothing-burger that academicians, consultants or soft-thinking theorists have imagined. Note that "safety culture" is not a new label. According to Cooper (2000), "The term 'safety culture' first made its appearance in the 1987 OECD Nuclear Agency report (INSAG, 1988) on the 1986 Chernobyl disaster." One definition of safety culture is "the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behavior that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organization's health and safety management" (Lee, 1996, as cited in NIOSH 2023).
The concept of safety culture extends beyond mere academic debate. Like all mindsets, embracing or rejecting it guides organizations toward diverse outcomes, like a path leading to very different destinations. Leaders who don't perceive something as significant naturally won't dedicate focus, efforts or financial resources toward enhancing it.
But a recent study extensively and rigorously analyzed safety culture, investigating 829 European companies across 29 countries over a 15-year period (Bautista-Bernal et al., 2024). This study evaluated the connection between safety culture and the safety and financial performance of those numerous-and statistically significant-companies.
The study authors began by acknowledging the aforementioned polarizing debate regarding the existence of safety culture. "There's substantial critical discussion, criticism, and caveats around safety culture in the empirical space (e.g. what is safety culture, what variables form the construct, is it separate to or part of organizational culture, functionalist vs, interpretivist approaches and more)" (BautistaBernal et al., 2024).
What Is Safety Culture?
Readers may have inferred my stance on the importance of enhancing safety culture from my initial remarks, or from my longstanding advocacy in spoken form and several articles. Such topics are often subject to bias, so to provide a clearer sense of where I'm coming from, here is some of my background:
*Undergraduate and graduate degrees in human factors and organizational psychology, complemented by more than 30 years of experience in the international arena primarily with large and...