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Article Excerpt
Introduction
In the past two decades there has been an increasing interest in the concept of safety culture as a means of reducing the potential for accidents associated with routine tasks. Notwithstanding its recent appearance in the field of safety management, safety culture is gaining acceptance due to its critical role for improving safety performance (Cooper, 2000; Guldenmund, 2000; Wiegmann, Zhang, Thaden, Sharma & Gibbons, 2004). Safety culture affects not only accident rates, but also on work methods, absenteeism, quality, productivity, commitment, loyalty and work satisfaction (Cooper, 1997).
In order to determine the level of the safety culture of a construction organization, there are a variety of quantitative and qualitative data collection tools available that can be used to measure safety culture, among which assessment of safety climate is constantly utilized as an effective measure (Cox & Cheyne, 2000; Lee & Harrison, 2000; O'Toole, 2002). However, a review of the literature shows that there is no apparent consensus on whether the measure of safety climate can be a reliable indicator of overall safety culture in an organization (Choudhry, Fang & Mohamed, 2007; Guldenmund, 2000). Cooper, (2000) argues that investigating safety culture through a safety climate measure had a propensity to focus solely on the way people perceive rather than representing various aspects of safety culture that have a tendency to be overlooked, such as behavior of employees, site situation or safety environment. Ongoing debate persists as to the distinction between safety culture and safety climate (Cooper, 2000; Guldenmund, 2000; Wiegmann, et al., 2004). So far, there appears to be no empirical examination of the relationship between safety climate and the safety culture of construction organizations, especially those operating in Singapore. Against this background, this study was proposed to (1) verify the relationship between safety climate and safety culture by conducting empirical examinations, and (2) determine the role of safety climate in predicting the overall safety culture of a construction organization.
Safety Culture and Safety Climate
The term safety culture was first introduced in INSAG's Summary Report on the Post-Accident Review Meeting on the Chernobyl Accident by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA, 1986). The term safety climate had appeared several years earlier in an investigation of safety attitudes in Israeli manufacturing (Zohar, 1980). Safety culture was defined by Safety Culture (International Safety Advisory Group, Safety-Series 75-INSAG-4) as the assembly of characteristics and attitudes in organizations and individuals, which establishes that, as an overriding priority, nuclear plant safety issues receive the attention warranted by their significance (IAEA, 1991). Since then, a considerable number of definitions of safety culture have abounded in the safety literature (Choudhry et al., 2007; Guldenmund, 2000; Wiegmann et al., 2004). According to Flin, (2007), the most widely accepted definition of safety culture comes from the nuclear power industry.
"The safety culture of an organization 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. Organizations with a positive culture are characterized by communications founded on mutual trust, by shared perceptions of the importance of safety and by confidence in the efficacy of preventive measures" (ACSNI, 1993, p. 23).
A recent review of safety culture literature by Wiegmann et al., (2004) identified a set of critical features regardless of the particular industry from the various definitions of safety culture. These critical features include the following:
1. "Safety culture is a concept defined at the group level or higher that refers to the shared values among all the group or organization members,
2. Safety culture is concerned with formal safety issues in an organization and closely related to, but not restricted to, the management and supervisory systems,
3. Safety culture emphasizes the contribution from everyone at every level of an organization,
4. The safety culture of an organization has an impact on its members' behavior at work,
5. Safety culture is usually reflected in the contingency between reward systems and safety performance, and
6. Safety culture is reflected in an organization's willingness to develop and learn from errors, incidents, and accidents" (Wiegmann et al., 2004, p. 123).
Zohar, (1980) first defined safety climate as a summary of "perceptions that employees share about their work environment" (p. 96). Flin, Mearns, Gordon and Fleming, (1998) defined safety climate as the perceived state of safety of a particular place at a particular time. It is therefore relatively unstable and subject to change depending on features of the operating environment. More recently, Zohar, (2003) suggested, "safety climate relates to shared perceptions with regard to safety policies, procedures and practices" (p. 125). According to Wiegmann et al., (2004), although literature has not presented a generally accepted definition of safety climate, "many definitions do have commonalities and do differ from safety culture in important ways" (p. 124). These commonalities include:
1. "Safety climate is a psychological phenomenon that is usually defined as the perceptions of the state of safety at a particular time;
2. Safety climate is closely concerned with intangible issues such as situational and environmental factors; and
3. Safety climate is a temporal phenomenon, a 'snapshot' of safety culture, relatively unstable and subject to change" (p. 124).
The aforementioned commonalities extracted from various definitions of safety culture and safety climate indicate that the two terms should not be viewed as alternatives. Safety climate is only a surface manifestation of safety culture (Schein, 1990). Cox and Flin, (1998) further suggested that the nature of culture and climate and their relationship has also been related to the concepts of personality and mood, whereas culture represents the more trait-like properties of personality and climate the more state-like properties of mood. Most recently, Choudhry et al., (2007) expressed safety climate as exactly the 'snapshot' that describes...
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