Revealing Asymmetries in Safety Culture through Proactive Vision

Abstract

Communicating with personnel is difficult if the concept under consideration is complex, hard to perceive, and/or has characteristics that are fuzzy in nature and need a long-term perspective to show results as a real benefit and advantage. Safety culture concepts belong to this type of management object. They have characteristics that are difficult to manage and lead, and that are difficult to articulate in detail to the organization. In fact, safety culture is one of the key concepts in modern safety management science and research. Contemporary scientists like to bring in new constructs to understand the mechanisms behind safety culture better; however, measuring abstract concepts like these needs support from theory and methodology, so that communication with personnel can be objective and, from a management point view, effective. In this research, we have used online applications to evaluate current safety culture levels, and to gain insight into how members of industrial organizations are willing to reveal their proactive vision, as well as their priorities in safety culture concepts, within their organization. In this research work we present practical safety culture knowledge asymmetries, which are crucial to comprehend from the viewpoint of safety leadership and management. The dataset used for this article contains 14 industrial companies with hundreds of participants.