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Incorporating organisational safety culture withinergonomics practiceTim Bentley a & David Tappin ba Healthy Work Group, School of Management, Massey University , Auckland, New Zealandb Scion Research , Auckland, New ZealandPublished online: 23 Sep 2010.

To cite this article: Tim Bentley & David Tappin (2010) Incorporating organisational safety culture within ergonomicspractice, Ergonomics, 53:10, 1167-1174, DOI: 10.1080/00140139.2010.512981

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Incorporating organisational safety culture within ergonomics practice

Tim Bentleya* and David Tappinb

aHealthy Work Group, School of Management, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand;bScion Research, Auckland, New Zealand

(Received 14 July 2009; final version received 16 July 2010)

This paper conceptualises organisational safety culture and considers its relevance to ergonomics practice. Issuesdiscussed in the paper include the modest contribution that ergonomists and ergonomics as a discipline have made tothis burgeoning field of study and the significance of safety culture to a systems approach. The relevance of safetyculture to ergonomics work with regard to the analysis, design, implementation and evaluation process, andimplications for participatory ergonomics approaches, are also discussed. A potential user-friendly, qualitativeapproach to assessing safety culture as part of ergonomics work is presented, based on a recently publishedconceptual framework that recognises the dynamic and multi-dimensional nature of safety culture. The paperconcludes by considering the use of such an approach, where an understanding of different aspects of safety culturewithin an organisation is seen as important to the success of ergonomics projects.

Statement of Relevance: The relevance of safety culture to ergonomics practice is a key focus of this paper, including itsrelationship with the systems approach, participatory ergonomics and the ergonomics analysis, design, implementationand evaluation process. An approach to assessing safety culture as part of ergonomics work is presented.

Keywords: assessment of safety culture; ergonomics studies; organisational safety culture; safety climate

1. Introduction

Interest in safety culture can be traced back to the 1986Chernobyl incident, although some six years earlier,Zohar’s (1980) landmark article: ‘Safety climate inindustrial organizations: theoretical and applied im-plications’, published in Journal of Applied Psychology,is often seen as the starting point for the field of study.Since that time, the literature on safety culture, and theassociated concept of safety climate, has grown apace,with contributions from across a wide range ofdiscipline areas (Glendon 2008), including a minorcontribution from ergonomics. Safety culture has atthe heart of its appeal the potential that, throughexamining it, one can understand the context in whichsuboptimal conditions can arise in high-hazard systemswithout detection or correction and address suchproblems before a catastrophe occurs (Guldenmund2007). Indeed, this is the reason that safety culture hasbeen such a focus for research within high-reliabilitysystems and for industry areas such as nuclear safety(Wilpert 2001), oil and gas (Mearns et al. 1998, Coxand Cheyne 2000, Flin et al. 2000, Høivik et al. 2009),aviation (Wiegmann et al. 2004), rail (Farrington-Darby et al. 2005), health (DeJoy 2005) and construc-tion (Dedobbeleer and Beland 1991). Moreover,measures of safety climate (a surface indicator of

safety culture) have a wider range of uses fororganisations, including measurement of employeeperceptions of management commitment to safety,detecting aspects of safety in need of improvement,identifying safety performance trends and establishingbenchmarks for safety levels in different organisations(Glendon and Litherland 2001).

Hudson (2007) is among those authors who believethat safety culture should be considered the next age ofsafety, given that the impact of the managementsystems age appears to be reaching a plateau in termsof significant advances in safety performance. Formost commentators, however, there is generalagreement that much work is still required if theconcept, content and outcomes of positive safetyculture are to be better understood and validated (Coxand Flin 1998, Guldenmund 2000, Hopkins 2006,Zohar 2008, Guldenmund 2010). While understandingof the concept of safety culture is still in its infancy, it isnow a well-used term and researchers have increasinglystrived to give practical value to it for the advancementof safety performance. This paper considers the rolethat ergonomists and human factors experts, in bothpractitioner and researcher roles, should take inprogressing the concept of safety culture in advancingthe discipline of ergonomics. (In this paper, the term

*Corresponding author. Email: T.A.Bentley@massey.ac.nz

Ergonomics

Vol. 53, No. 10, October 2010, 1167–1174

ISSN 0014-0139 print/ISSN 1366-5847 online

� 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/00140139.2010.512981

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‘ergonomics’ and its derivatives is taken to include‘human factors’ and its derivatives.)

Before turning to this discussion, however, it isnecessary to define safety culture and consider what isunderstood about its content and structure.

2. Conceptualising safety culture and safety climate

Organisational safety culture has been defined byCooper (2000) as: ‘. . .the sub-facet of organisationalculture that is thought to affect members’ attitudes andbehaviour in relation to an organisation’s ongoinghealth and safety performance’. Similarly, Blewett andShaw (1997) defined safety culture as: ‘the system ofshared values and beliefs about health and safetywhich create behavioural norms which guide healthand safety activities in the enterprise’. These defini-tions, like many others found in the literature, areclosely linked to the wider concept of organisationalculture (see Glendon and Stanton 2000) and, inparticular, Schein’s three-layered culture model(Schein 1992), although the concept of safety culturehas not developed theoretically from organisationalculture (Choudhry et al. 2007). In common with mostconceptualisations, these definitions emphasise thecritical link between safety culture and the health andsafety management system, through shared valuesand beliefs that guide behaviour patterns and healthand safety activities in the organisation. Furtherassertions that a positive safety culture is seen asessential to an effective safety management systemhave been provided by the Health and Safety Commis-sion (1993) in the UK, who defined safety culture as:

The product of individual and group values, attitudes,perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behaviourthat determine commitment to, and the style andproficiency of, an organisation’s health and safetymanagement. Organisations with a positive safetyculture are characterised by communications foundedon mutual trust by shared perceptions of the impor-tance of safety and by confidence in the efficacy ofprevention measures.

The terms ‘safety culture’ and ‘safety climate’ areoften used interchangeably to refer to similar concepts(Cox and Flin 1998). Indeed, safety climate isessentially a snapshot of the safety culture, which,unlike safety culture, is relatively unstable and subjectto change (Wiegmann et al. 2004). Definitions thatcapture these attributes of safety climate include thatof Mearns, et al. (1998), who described safety climateas a superficial construct, comprising the attitudes andbeliefs of workers, which guide their subsequentbehaviour. A slightly different emphasis was suggestedby Zohar (2008), who defined organisational safety

climate as the shared perceptions [among members ofan organisation] with regard to safety policies,procedures and practices. Zohar (2008) further arguedthat, since safety issues often compete with otheroperations issues, notably productivity, and since therelative priority of safety and other goals is anindicator for the relevance of such policies foremployees, assessment of safety climate perceptionsneeds to be concerned with the consensus of the truepriority of safety. In summarising the keycharacteristics of safety culture and climate from theliterature, Wiegmann et al. (2004) concluded thatsafety culture can be viewed as an enduringcharacteristic of an organisation (analogous to trait orpersonality) that is reflected in its ongoing safetyactivity and priorities. Safety climate, on the otherhand, can be seen as a temporary ‘state’ of anorganisation that is changeable, depending on theprevailing organisational and environmentalconditions (Wiegmann et al. 2004). A further point ofsummary from the literature as it relates to this paperis that no definitions or descriptions of safety climateor culture have incorporated any direct or impliedreference to ergonomics or human factors.

Safety climate is the construct most commonlymeasured in studies of organisations, withpsychometric survey items usually related toperceptions of a range of organisational indicators ofsafety culture, including management commitment,communications between management and employeesand environmental conditions (Zohar 1980). The issueof safety culture and climate assessment is consideredin greater depth below, in relation to the discussion ofappropriate ways for assessing culture in ergonomicsstudies.

While definitions help to conceptualise safetyculture, a description of the construct is of greater use(Haukelid 2008, cited in Høivik et al. 2009). As onemight expect from the wide range of definitions ofsafety culture that have been proposed and therelatively fragmented nature of much of the researchon safety culture, there is a general lack of agreementas to how many indicators, and which indicators,comprise or reflect an organisation’s safety culture(Wiegmann et al. 2004). An analysis of differentreports and papers on safety culture by Wiegmannet al. (2004) concluded that there are at least five globalcomponents or indicators of safety culture, including:‘organisational commitment’, ‘managementinvolvement’, ‘employee empowerment’, ‘rewardsystems’ and ‘reporting systems’. Research has alsocommonly identified ‘risk’, ‘system safety’, ‘workpressure’ and ‘competence’ as safety culture factors(Flin et al. 2000, Glendon and Litherland 2001).Foremost among these factors, however, appears to be

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organisational, or top management, commitment. Thisrefers to the extent to which top-level managementidentifies safety as a core value or guiding principle ofthe organisation (Wiegmann et al. 2004). Thiscommitment at senior levels provides for adequateresourcing and support for the development andimplementation of safety activities.

Other writers have emphasised the multi-dimensional nature of organisational safety culture(Geller 1994, Reason 1997, Clarke 2000, Glendon andStanton 2000, Parker et al. 2006, Glendon 2008, Zohar2008). Cooper (2000), for example, conceptualisedsafety culture as a multi-faceted construct, comprisinginteracting psychological behavioural and situationalfactors. From the view of Cooper’s ‘reciprocal model’,workers’ attitudes and perceptions in regard to safetycan be measured using safety climate questionnaires.Safety-related behaviours can be assessed using check-lists and situational/organisational factors may beassessed through safety audits or analysis of documen-tation of the organisation’s safety managementsystems.

The developmental aspect of culture has also beenconsidered in the advancement of theory by a smallergroup of researchers (Parker et al. 2006, Hudson 2007),acknowledging that different aspects of safety culture(concrete and abstract aspects) can be at different stagesof advancement within the same organisation ordivision. This too has important implications for themeasurement of safety culture, where a single globalassessment of safety culture is likely to be insensitive todifferences in advancement across the various aspectsof safety culture. Moreover, different parts of an orga-nisation may have safety sub-cultures at different levelsof advancement, further complicating the assessment ofsafety culture in large and complex organisations.

3. Ergonomics contributions to safety culture research

A recent review of the literature on safety culture andsafety climate undertaken by Ian Glendon, for aspecial edition on safety culture in Journal of Occupa-tional Health and Safety – Australia and New Zealand,found just eight of a total of 203 refereed journalcontributions with a prime focus on the topic of safetyculture to be from the discipline of ergonomics/humanfactors (Glendon 2008). The disciplinary origin of 55%of articles was safety (including 4% from ergonomics/human factors), 20% psychology, 13% health and11% management. While it is difficult to assess theprecise extent to which ergonomists and human factorsresearchers actually have published on safety cultureand closely related topics, this breakdown indicatesthat few appear to do so overtly. Of those articleswithin the ergonomics/human factors literature,

published in Human Factors (Gaba et al. 2003, Desaiet al. 2006), Human Factors and Ergonomics inManufacturing (Flin 2003) and International Journal ofOccupational Safety and Ergonomics (Alhemood, et al.2004, Salminen and Seppala 2005, Morley and Harris2006, Lee et al. 2007), the majority were empiricalsafety climate papers, while none was concerned withergonomics aspects of safety culture or climate. Theclear implication from Glendon’s review, then, is thatergonomics as a discipline has been almost entirelywithout voice on this important developing area ofhealth and safety. This is not to say that ergonomistsand human factors researchers have not madecontributions to knowledge in this area, but rather thatmuch of this work has either been published incollaboration with researchers from other areas,notably safety and psychology, or appears in the greyliterature only. Examples of notable contributionsinclude the work of human factors researchers andothers at the Health and Safety Laboratories in theUK (Sugden et al. 2009), a group who have played aleading role in developing tools for the assessment ofsafety climate in organisations (Health and SafetyExecutive 1997).

4. Relevance of safety culture to ergonomics practice

From a systems perspective (concerned with theinteraction between broad work system components,including organisational and contextual factors thatcan influence downstream workplace activity), aconsideration of cultural issues would seem to be a keyrequirement for work systems analysis. Whereergonomics work is concerned with aspects of safety,then safety culture is an important variable inunderstanding work system interactions of relevance tothe problem. While early ergonomics models (e.g.Shackel 1974) were limited in scope to user, machine,workspace and environment interactions, the scope ofcontemporary systems thinking is much broader.Indeed, Moray’s systems model recommends aconsiderable expansion in the scope of ergonomicswork in addressing society’s problems, with thecommonly used concentric rings model expanded soouter rings extend to culture, politics, economy andsociety (Moray 2000). While organisational andcultural factors may be accounted for in high-hazard,high-reliability work systems analysis, it is argued thata broader approach, including aspects of safetyculture, should also be taken to ergonomics workconcerned with more everyday workplace health andsafety problems. Work by the present authors hasfollowed this thinking. Tappin et al. (2008), forexample, focused on the role of contextual factors onmusculoskeletal disorders (MSD) in the New Zealand

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meat processing sector, finding that a wide range ofcultural, organisational and other broad contextualfactors had important influences on workers’ exposureto physical and psychosocial risk factors for MSD.Similarly, Bentley’s (2009) conceptual ergonomicsmodel for workplace slips, trips and falls (STF) alsoconsidered a broad range of cultural, organisationaland design factors in STF aetiology.

A further observation that relates safety culture toergonomics and systems thinking is the multi-dimen-sional nature of safety culture. As noted above,contemporary thinking on safety culture is that itcomprises interacting psychological (people), beha-vioural (jobs) and situational (organisation) factors(Cooper 2000). This conceptualisation fits well with anergonomics approach to systems analysis and the clearinference is that an ergonomics perspective shouldequip the discipline well to contribute to theoreticaland practical developments in this area, as well asprompting ergonomists to consider aspects of safetyculture in ergonomics work.

While some ergonomics work is very narrow inscope, failing to adequately account for anythingbeyond the inner rings in Moray’s model, most practi-tioners and researchers would recognise the importanceof considering wider organisational issues in theanalysis, design and implementation of systems. How-ever, few would claim to specifically include a consi-deration of aspects of safety culture in their analysis,although it is probable that many consider these factorsin a non-systematic manner when conducting researchor practising in the occupational health and safety(OHS) area. Ergonomists may also reasonably feel thatthey lack the necessary tools to measure safety cultureor aspects of it systematically as part of their wideranalysis, or because the use of available tools may betime consuming and/or beyond the scope of theirexpertise or brief. Whatever the reason, there may be aless than successful outcome where cultural factors arenot considered adequately. Indeed, Blewett and Shaw(1997, p. 46) assert strongly the need for OHS practi-tioners to be aware that irrespective of the technicalcontent of ergonomics/human factors solutions, theycan seldom be implemented without due considerationof wider socio-technical workplace systems. For exam-ple, new initiatives to support safety may be ignored bythe workforce where senior management fail to modelor actively support them, while communication failuresmay limit understanding and uptake across the organi-sation in relation to a new reporting system and newways of working may have to compete with incentiveswithin the system that support current (unsafe)practices.

Figure 1 provides a simplified illustration of thisrelationship between organisational safety culture and

ergonomics in organisations. The relationship betweensafety culture and the OHS management system is alsoindicated, reflecting agreement in the literature on thisrelationship and the multi-dimensional nature of safetyculture. Note that safety culture can either directlyinfluence the nature and effectiveness of ergonomicsinterventions within a work system or can influencethese indirectly through the organisation’s OHSmanagement system. Also note that this influenceworks in both directions. Hence, ergonomicsinterventions can impact on aspects of safety culture –such as the level of employee involvement or reportingbehaviour patterns – as well as being influenced bythese cultural aspects.

A further important factor, which can significantlyinfluence the effectiveness of much ergonomicsintervention work in organisations, is that of thedegree of employee involvement in OHS and employeeempowerment across the organisation. These factors,together with top management commitment, aregenerally crucial to the success of intervention workand, in particular, participatory ergonomics initiatives(Kuorinka 1997, Wilson and Haines 1997, Wilson et al.2005). Indeed, the keys to successful participatoryinitiatives, according to Wilson et al. (2005), includecommitment to the project at all levels of theorganisation, a champion to support and/or facilitatethe process, commitment by senior managers andstakeholders, a supportive climate and an opencommunicative organisation.

The central argument of this paper, then, is tosuggest that in undertaking ergonomics studies, wherethe focus is employee health and safety, ergonomistsshould be cognisant of the role of safety culture. Thismay be particularly important for participatoryergonomics interventions. Indeed, the success oreffectiveness of the design and implementation of anysystem within an organisation will be powerfullyimpacted by safety culture. This view is supported byFarrington-Darby et al. (2005), who argued that:

Figure 1. The relationship between safety culture,occupational health and safety (OHS) management systemsand ergonomics initiatives in organisations.

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Without a positive safety culture and climate it couldbe said that there is already resistance in theenvironment into which safety programs and schemesare being implemented . . . explaining the lack ofstaying power of such initiatives in bringing aboutpermanent change.

These factors are clearly indicated in the relation-ships between culture, systems and ergonomics andOHS initiatives shown in Figure 1.

Experience shows that the ergonomist is likely tofind a qualitative assessment of certain aspects ofsafety culture (e.g. reporting culture, OHS commu-nications, top management commitment to OHS) to bea more useful exercise in relation to the focus of theirwork than any single, global measure of safety cultureor climate. The following section briefly outlines anapproach to assessing the level of advancement fordifferent aspects of safety culture, as part of ergo-nomics studies. The intention is to suggest an easilyadaptable measurement tool, which can be developedfor use by ergonomists and other practitioners across arange of industry settings.

5. Assessing aspects of safety culture in ergonomics

work

So how should ergonomics and human factorsresearchers and professionals go about measuringsafety culture systematically as part of ergonomicsanalysis and systems design and implementation? Mostquantitative measures of safety culture – or safetyclimate (Glendon and Litherland 2001, Guldenmund2007, Zohar 2008) – focus on workers’ attitudes andperceptions in relation to safety in organisations. Theuse of safety climate measures are limited to indivi-duals with the necessary tools and methodologicalskills, require relatively large respondent numbers(employees) and result in global measures of climaterather than useful information about specific aspects ofthe culture of interest to the investigator. Furthermore,there is little agreement about which particular set offactors comprise a safety climate, as different research-ers have failed to find a consistent safety climate factorstructure (Glendon and Litherland 2001, Zohar 2008).Moreover, such measures may ignore other importantaspects of safety culture. Indeed, as noted earlier, theliterature strongly supports the view of safety cultureas a multi-dimensional concept (e.g. Geller 1994,Reason 1997, Cooper 2000, Glendon and Stanton2000). At present, no one tool exists to measure allfeatures of safety culture (Cooper 2000, Farrington-Darby et al. 2005, Bentley and Tappin 2008).

The methodology for analysis of safety culture inergonomics studies briefly presented in this paper isbased on a framework for understanding the

development of organisational safety culture (Parkeret al. 2006), in which safety culture is conceptualised asa multi-dimensional concept and the developmentalaspect of culture is considered. The theoretically basedframework comprises a range of concrete and abstractaspects of safety culture and provides descriptors fromwhich levels of safety cultural development can bedetermined for each of 12 aspects of safety culture (theoriginal version by Parker et al. 2006 contained 18aspects). The descriptors are designed to reflect thelevel of development across five levels of advancement(Lawrie, et al. 2006, Parker, et al. 2006):

. Pathological (who cares about safety as long asthey are not caught?).

. Reactive (safety is important: a lot is done everytime someone is injured).

. Calculative (there are systems in place to manageall hazards).

. Proactive (one tries to anticipate safety problemsbefore they arise).

. Generative (health and safety is how business isdone around here).

The revised conceptual framework has beenevaluated by these authors in the assessment of thesafety culture in a New Zealand utility company(Bentley and Tappin 2008). The study assessed thelevel of development for a number of aspects of theorganisation’s safety culture, based on the revisedframework for understanding the development oforganisation safety culture, and examined theeffectiveness of such an approach for measuringaspects of safety culture of interest within a widerergonomics study. Findings from this study, which wascommissioned to identify the source of reporting andsafety behaviour problems in the organisation, can befound in the original publication. Here, a briefoverview of the safety culture assessment tool, whichwas developed and evaluated in this research, ispresented (Bentley and Tappin 2008).

5.1. The revised safety culture qualitative framework

The qualitative framework for the assessment of safetyculture is based on a theoretical framework for analysis(also see Farrington-Darby et al. 2005). Theframework was tailored from that presented by Parkeret al. (2006), based on an oil industry context, to fit thecontext of the case study organisation (a utilitycompany). This was achieved through exploratoryface-to-face interviews with senior managers and areview of health and safety documentation. As a resultof this exploratory research, adjustments were made tothe framework to ensure the best possible fit within the

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organisational context. The original 18 concrete andabstract aspects of safety culture were reduced to 10,through a process of collapsing several similar concreteand abstract pairs of aspects into a single aspect.Table 1 shows the 10 aspects evaluated in this study,plus two additional aspects, ‘employee involvement’and ‘work pressure’, added subsequently to betterrepresent the range of factors identified in the literatureand through experience working with organisations.

It is suggested that this framework could readily betailored to fit with other industry and organisationalcontexts to support analysis of cultural factors by ergo-nomists as part of work systems analysis and design. Ofcourse, the nature of the study and organisation willimpact on the degree of emphasis placed on each aspect.For example, knowledge about the level of top manage-ment commitment to OHS, employee engagement inOHS matters and the dominant model of OHSemployed in incident investigations will prove invaluablein redesigning reporting systems, while other aspectssuch as work pressure, training quality, and contractor

management may be more relevant to the developmentof new manual handling tools and processes.

How was this framework used to assess aspects ofsafety culture within the case study organisation? Levelof advancement for each of the original 10 aspects wasdetermined through a combination of focus groups,semi-structured interviews and analysis ofdocumentation related to the safety managementsystem (Bentley and Tappin 2008). This addressedorganisational as well as behavioural and psychologicallevels of safety culture for each aspect, with the analysisassessing both concrete (systems and behaviour) andabstract (perceptions) elements for each aspect. Dataproduced through these analyses were compared with aset of descriptors for each safety culture aspect and,from this analysis, level of safety culture advancement(pathological – generative) was determined for eachaspect (see Bentley and Tappin 2008).

The resulting analysis allowed strengths andweaknesses in different aspects of the case studyorganisation’s safety culture and specifically around

Table 1. Assessing 12 aspects of safety culture.

Safety culture aspect Concrete and abstract examples (from which descriptors derived)

Top management commitment/organisationalcommitment

Perception of commitment by employeesAttendance/visibility in OHS matters (e.g. OHS committee chair;attendance at incident)

OHS communication Quality and nature of top-down communicationQuantity of bottom-up communicationDissemination from OHS committee and OHS function

OHS training/job competency training Level of training completed for high-hazard tasks/team leadersfor contractors

Responsiveness to training requestsEmployee perception of training adequacy and job competency

OHS management system Quality of document managementClarity of procedures for emergenciesUse of process measures of performance

OHS organisation Dedicated OHS functionOHS specialists in organisationAuthority level of OHS staff

Employee safety commitment and behaviour Level of understanding of personal OHS responsibilitiesReporting attitudes and behaviour

OHS reporting Level of minor incident and near-miss reportingPresence of barriers and incentives to reportingPerceived organisational response/feedback to reporting

OHS model for investigations Level of emphasis on person vs. systems approachNature of incident forms – simplistic vs. broadQuality of investigations and intervention

OHS meetings OHS an agenda item for all meetingsRegular meetings with contractors

Contractor management and OHS standards Visibility of field staff/supervisorsUnderstanding of high-hazard contractor activitiesInformation sharing and learning opportunities

Employee involvement/engagement in OHS Level of involvement of individuals without formal OHS rolesEmpowerment of employees in planning of high-hazard tasks andhazard management

Work pressure Perceived production pressure – time to do things safelyAppropriate shift scheduling and staffing levels

OHS ¼ occupational health and safety.

Adapted from Bentley and Tappin (2008).

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those areas of interest to the ergonomics study aroundincident reporting. It is suggested that this method forassessing safety culture through the use of a qualitativetool could be employed by ergonomists in support ofwork systems analysis to ensure effective design andimplementation of interventions in organisations. Asnoted earlier, it is also important to be cognisant ofpotential variations in levels of safety culture maturityacross different parts of larger and complexorganisations. This should be accounted for whenapplying this methodology in such environments.

6. Conclusions

This paper has conceptualised organisational safetyculture and considered its relevance to ergonomicspractice. An extension of the concentric rings model ofergonomics factors, it is argued, should includeorganisational, social and cultural factors. Multi-dimensional aspects of safety culture, including person,task/behaviour and organisational/situation factors, fitwell with the ergonomics, systems perspective. How-ever, reviews of the safety culture literature (notablythat of Glendon 2008) suggests a very modest contri-bution from ergonomics to this field of study. Theimportance for considering safety culture as part of abroad systems approach and within the analysis, design,implementation and evaluation process is argued to beessential where permanent change is required. A furtherfactor considered is the use of participatory ergonomicsapproaches and the influence that key cultural aspectssuch as top management commitment and employeeempowerment can have on such work. However, thepractical ability of ergonomists to undertake a systema-tic assessment of safety culture or aspects of culturalconcern to ergonomics projects is currently limited bythe lack of a suitable tool.

In response to this apparent need, a potential user-friendly, qualitative approach to assess safety cultureas part of ergonomics work has been presented, basedon a recently published conceptual framework thatrecognises the dynamic and multi-dimensional natureof safety culture. The revised framework, evaluated bythese authors, was found to be highly effective foridentifying strengths and weaknesses across aspects ofa case study organisation’s safety culture, includingthose aspects of particular interest to the widerergonomics study. The use of a multi-dimensionalframework to safety culture allowed the identificationof a baseline measure of level of development acrossthe different aspects of safety culture, and direction forsafety culture advancement across the various aspects(see Bentley and Tappin 2008).

It is concluded that the approach described herehas potential for use in ergonomics studies and by

practitioners conducting work systems analysis andwhere understanding key aspects of safety culture areimportant to systems design and implementation.Advantages of this approach over quantitative,questionnaire-based approaches include theconceptualisation of safety culture as a multi-dimensional construct – in line with contemporarythinking on safety culture (Reason 1997, 1998, Cooper2000, Glendon and Stanton 2000, Choudhry et al.2007), as well as a dynamic concept (Parker et al.2006). The ability to focus around key aspects of safetyculture most relevant to the particular problem underinvestigation by ergonomists was a further strength.Other important advantages were the use of qualitativedata collection methods, where relatively smallnumbers of respondents were available, and ability tocollect rich data related to beliefs, stories and mythsabout organisational life (Blewett and Shaw 1997).While authors such as Guldenmund (2000) have notedlimitations of safety climate measures, Glendon et al.(2006) described safety climate studies that do includea multi-level analysis of culture, suggesting amovement in the right direction in terms of bothclimate and culture. In view of these points, it is arguedthat this approach has the potential to advance thepractical value of safety culture for ergonomicspractitioners, where a revised version of the frameworkcan be adapted through exploratory research to fit thestudy context. Further research should consider howreadily adaptable this measurement tool is for use byergonomists and other practitioners across a range ofindustry settings.

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