Organizational safety

Abstract

Problem: While several management practices have been cited as important components of safety programs, how much does each incrementally contribute to injury reduction? This study examined the degree to which six management practices frequently included in safety programs (management commitment, rewards, communication and feedback, selection, training, and participation) contributed to a safe work environment for hospital employees. Method: Participants were solicited via telephone to participate in a research study concerning hospital risk management. Sixty-two hospitals provided data concerning management practices and employee injuries. Results: Overall, the management practices reliably predicted injury rates. A factor analysis performed on the management practices scale resulted in the development of six factor scales. A multiple regression performed on these factor scales found that proactive practices reliably predicted injury rates. Remedial measures acted as a suppressor variable. Discussion: While most of the participating hospitals implemented reactive practices (fixing problems once they have occurred), what differentiated the hospitals with low injury rates was that they also employed proactive measures to prevent accidents. Impact on Industry: The most effective step that hospitals can take is in the front-end hiring and training of new personnel. They should also ensure that the risk management position has a management-level classification. This study also demonstrated that training in itself is not adequate.

Introduction

On an average day, 17 US workers are killed and 16,000 are injured in work-related accidents, resulting in a cost to industry of more than US$110 billion annually (Barr, 1998). This injury rate is increasing. Traditional safety efforts have focused on the engineering aspects of safety; however, relatively few accidents (10%) are a consequence of unsafe mechanical or physical conditions. While most on-the-job accidents and injuries appear to result from employees' unsafe acts, incidents typically are not caused by single operator errors, but are end-events in a chain of interacting factors on several systems levels (Wilpert, 1994). While many unsafe acts are committed, very few will penetrate an organization's defenses to result in accident or injury (Reason, 1994).

It is becoming increasingly apparent that it is restrictive to discuss failures of large-scale technological systems solely in terms of the technological aspects. Individuals, their organizations, groups, and cultures are all-important factors in the design, construction, operation, and monitoring of technological systems. Until recently, this issue has been described in the related literature in terms of “human error.” While human error does contribute to accidents, the behavioral causes of failure are often found to be far more subtle when incidents are analyzed as part of a technological system (Pidgeon, 1991).

Many expectations are built into the current US health and safety legislation that specifies the responsibilities of managers and employees with regard to safe working practices. These suppositions are more likely to be fulfilled if a positive cultural attitude toward safety exists. The costs of failure to comply with these expectations are increasing. As workers become more educated, they are more likely to expect safer working conditions; a more safety and environmentally conscious public is increasingly willing to express its disapproval of companies that are perceived to behave carelessly. This public reproach was evident during the American consumer boycott of Exxon gasoline following the Valdez oil spill (Turner, 1991).

Researchers have found that safety performance is affected by an organization's socially transmitted beliefs and attitudes toward safety (Ostrom, Wilhelmsen, & Kaplan, 1993). The concept of safety culture (Pidgeon, 1991) was developed as a result of the 1986 Chernobyl accident, which focused attention on the human and organizational elements contributing to the unsafe operation of technological systems. Safety culture is an organization's norms, beliefs, roles, attitudes, and practices concerned with minimizing exposure of employees to workplace hazards (Turner, 1991). The goal of a safety culture is to develop a norm in which employees are aware of the risks in their workplace and are continually on the lookout for hazards (Ostrom et al., 1993). A safety culture motivates and recognizes safe behavior by focusing on the attitudes and behaviors of the employees. It is a process—not a program; it takes time to develop and requires a collective effort to implement its many features (Barr, 1998).

Changing a company's culture is more difficult than issuing a new policy statement. Traditional customs and practices constrain new thinking (Kletz, 1985). While many authors on safety management attach great importance to a formal statement of a company's safety policy, Kletz (1993) does not believe such a statement will impact a company's accident record. He believes that the culture or “common law” of a company is more influential, conveyed by such actions as a phone call from the head office immediately after an incident, asking not if anyone was hurt, but when the plant would be back on line. In this case, the cultural “message” is that production, not people or safety, is the priority.

Researchers have found a direct organizational culture–performance link. According to Siehl and Martin (1990), a “strong” organizational culture is one where espoused values are consistent with behavior and where employees share the same view of the firm. Conversely, a weak culture results when people at all levels of the hierarchy fail to share the values espoused by management. The challenge facing organizations is to discover how to displace existing cultural patterns where they lack an appropriate concern with safety, and to replace them with new, self-perpetuating elements, which show a greater degree of care. While there are many potential external influences that make it difficult to define a “strong” safety culture across settings, there are many features that safety cultures from successful organizations have in common. In order to cultivate a strong safety culture, several measures can be taken.

Zohar's (1980) study of safety climate used a factor analysis to identify climate dimensions that could discriminate among factories based on their safety climate levels. A few practitioners and experts Cohen & Cleveland, 1983, Pidgeon, 1991, Turner, 1991 described factors they believe to be prevalent in the safety culture of organizations that have low injury rates. The variables described below are a compilation of the factors found across several of these reports.

Six management practices have been consistently discussed in reports concerning safety culture: (a) rewards, (b) training, (c) hiring, (d) communication/feedback, (e) participation, and (f) management support. The objective of the current study was to determine the extent to which these six variables predict employee injury rates.