Abstract of Meeting Paper

Society for Risk Analysis - Europe 1998 Annual Meeting

Assessing Safety Culture in a Chemical Manufacturing Plant. Terence Lee, Environmental Psychology & Policy Research Unit, School of Psychology, University of St Andrews, Fife, Scotland

There is growing consensus that the prevailing culture of an organisation is what predisposes both to economic success and effective saféty management. However, culture is the coalescence of an extremely diffuse range of value% norms, attitudes and behaviours. It follows that measurement, on which attention is now focused, is a challenging task

The large majority of organisations still rely on audits and peer reviews alone and although these assess the range of constituent elements in the saféty management system, they do not go very far in measuring the effectiveness. Key performance indicators are also used, but these are no more than fragmentary and have no diagnostic value.

Accordingly, there is growing interest in personnel safety surveys, which attempt to measure the saféty-related. attitudes of all staff, together with perceptions of key saféty roles and selfreported saféty behaviour.

A study is described of 833 staff (74% of the workforce) in a large chemical manufacturing plant. The questionnaire contains 145 items covering nine separate domains of saféty. When subjected to Principal Components analysis, these generate a total of 32 factors. These measures are validated by comparison with six criteria of accident history and seven accident precursor events'.

A combined attitude score for each respondent provides an overall indication of the strette of safety attitudes and safety compliant behaviours and this is usefW for malcing overall comparisons across departments, work areas, job types and biographical variables. A fWl profile for each of these against the 32 factors provides a detailed picture of strengths and weaknesses.

Some organisational variables (e.g. management style) are correlated with 'good' saféty attitudes.

A total of seven organisations have now been assessed by similar methods and the use of multi-dimensional scaling facilitates comparisons between them, without the invidiousness of a 'league table'.