Safety climate factors in construction – a literature review

It is an established fact that a mature safety climate and a rich safety culture contribute to achieving a safe workplace. This paper aims to explore and to make explicit the existing safety climate assessment tools and dimensions and suggests the leading factors that can be used for safety climate assessment in construction. The construction industry and the status of occupational safety and health are firstly discussed in a global context. The concept of safety climate is then discussed with a review of different safety climate factors from the published literature. A qualitative research method was employed to explore the existing safety climate factors. A total of 19 safety climate assessment tools with 103 safety climate factors spanning over a period of 39 years (1980–2019) are discussed. The most prevailing safety climate factors including management commitment, training, employees’ involvement, behaviour, communication, accountability and justice, and leadership are discussed in the paper. It is recommended that the factors discussed in this paper may need to be validated first before they are incorporated in the assessment of the safety climate of a specific construction project and organisation in a country or region

Managing Change in the Nuclear Industry: The Effects on Safety

The nuclear industry is going through a period of unprecedented change. The changes arise from the political and business environment in which the industry must operate, and from within the industry itself as it strives to become more competitive. It is absolutely essential that throughout the period of time that organizational changes are taking place, and after the changes have occurred, very high standards of safety are maintained by all the elements that make up the industry. [INSAG 18, A report by INSAG].nuclear industry, safety, standards of safety, organizational safety, downsizing

Management systems for safety in nuclear industries

Requirements on well documented management systems for Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) are relatively new and in different developmental phases. Thus there is a need of knowledge about well-functioning Safety Management Systems (SMSs) also considering other goals and restrictions. Since there ia a lack of mature management systems for NPPs it is important to learn from other NPPs, but also from other safety critical industries. The objectives of this paper are to identify and discuss some important elements that should be included and well managed in SMSs in the NPP sector. Information is taken from reports from major accidents, the scientific literature and interviews. The results are pointing at weaknesses in the SMS at the concern and site levels and a need for specific training for the top management. Abilities to anticipate and cope with foreseeable and unforeseeable events are stressed. Important topics in development are indicators and probabilistic risk analysis

The impact of organizational culture on Concurrent Engineering, Design-for-Safety, and product safety performance

This paper empirically extends the research on the relationships between organizational culture, new product development (NPD) practices, and product safety performance (PSP). Using Schein's conceptualization of culture (i.e., underlying assumptions, espoused values, and artifacts), we build and test a model among five variables: top management commitment to safety (MCS), group level product safety culture (PSC) at NPD, Concurrent Engineering (CE), Design-for-Safety (DFS), and product safety performance. We propose that the underlying assumption of safety first affects the espoused values (group level product safety culture at NPD) and artifacts of organizational culture (Concurrent Engineering and Design-for-Safety); espoused value influences artifacts; and artifacts impact product safety performance. These hypotheses are tested by structural analyses of 255 survey responses collected from 126 firms in the juvenile product sector. While management commitment to safety, product safety culture, and Design-for-Safety are significant product safety predictors, as expected, Concurrent Engineering has no significant direct effect on product safety. We discuss the implications of these findings for the field of product safety