Improving Safety Culture: : A Practical Guide

Citation

Young, S. (1998), "Improving Safety Culture: : A Practical Guide", Leadership & Organization Development Journal, Vol. 19 No. 6, pp. 347-347. https://doi.org/10.1108/lodj.1998.19.6.347.1

The important influence that safety culture exerts on an organization’s efficiency of operations, operational costs and bottom‐line profits is being increasingly recognised by managers at all levels. There is a growing interest in the contribution psychology has to make to understanding and managing safety within organizations. This is evidenced by the maturing body of research being undertaken by researchers such as those at the Safety Research Unit at the University of Liverpool, James Reason at the Manchester University, Rhona Flin at the University of Aberdeen, and Sue Cox at the University of Loughborough, to name but a few.

Dominic Cooper’s book contributes to this growing field, while providing a suitable vehicle for his own consultancy efforts. He aims to provide a practical guide to improving organizational safety culture. While the book draws on a considerable body of academic research, this is not an academic text. Indeed, there is a great deal of unreferenced work within the book, which for the academic is rather frustrating.

Ever since the Chernobyl disaster, there has been a growing interest in the concept of safety culture. Within the literature in general however, the concept of safety culture remains conceptually confused, as does its relationship to the related concepts of safety attitude and safety climate. Cooper provides his own view of safety culture. He draws on Bandura’s social learning theory to define it as “The product of multiple goal‐directed interactions between people (psychological), jobs (behavioural) and the organisation (situational)” (p. 17). While his model of safety culture is perhaps more clearly defined than some, his discussion of its relationships to attitudes and climate remains conceptually unclear. As a result, I think this will leave many practitioners similarly confused as to quite what they are dealing with.

Nevertheless, the book is full of practical techniques for safety practitioners and managers to draw upon. He adopts a three level strategy for improving safety cultures: immediate, intermediate and ultimate. The immediate level deals with developing strategic plans, converting these into action plans and implementing them. It covers issues of leadership, organizational systems and risk analysis. The intermediate level is then concerned with developing management information systems and safety auditing. Finally, the ultimate level, the area in which psychologists currently have much interest, deals with developing safety training, measuring safety climate, and improving safety behaviour through psychological techniques such as goal setting and feedback.

I was rather disappointed that this final section on developing employee safety related behaviour, the climax of the book, was so short, only about 30 pages. After all the build up, the final product felt a little thin. Of course, this is partly because of the wide coverage of material throughout the book. Nevertheless, the material in the preceding sections of the book has been dealt with at length elsewhere, while there is still little published on the application of psychology to improving safety behaviour. While Cooper’s final section makes a worthwhile contribution to the area, one is left with the impression that this is an area deserving of a book in its own right.