Elsevier

Safety Science

Volume 46, Issue 3, March 2008, Pages 450-460
Safety Science

Diagnosis of safety culture: A replication and extension towards assessing “safe” organizational change processes

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2007.05.005Get rights and content

Abstract

Organizational changes that are apparently unrelated to risk and safety management may in fact be very relevant to the level of process and work safety, e.g. based on “objective” parameters like work load and “subjective” parameters like motivation. Therefore, assessments of an organization’s risk quality should also consider change management during major organizational changes. To help such assessments an existing questionnaire used to evaluate safety management and safety culture was extended to include indicators for change management. Results from applying the new instrument at seven petrochemical plants as part of insurance audits are presented. The validity of the previously developed parts of the questionnaire measuring perceptions of operational safety management by means of three scales “Enacted Safety”, “Formal Safety”, and “Technical Safety” and of safety and design strategies by means of 16 items related to various characteristics of managing safety and uncertainty was confirmed. A principal components analysis with the 16 newly developed items for evaluating change management revealed four factors, “Esteem”, “Procedures for Organizational Change”, “Transparence”, and “Vision”, corresponding partially to four content areas deemed crucial for safe organizational change, i.e. reflected radicality of change, support for constructive redevelopment, esteem for employees, and employee involvement. Evidence for the validity of the new scales is provided and the usefulness of the new instrument discussed.

Introduction

When evaluating a company’s risk quality, for example as part of insurance assessment, technical factors have been dominant, with only fairly recent introduction of some consideration of the company’s formal safety management and to a lesser degree the company’s safety culture (e.g. Müller et al., 1998). While the acceptance of organizational safety measures as crucial determinants of system safety is growing, a push for an even broader view of organizational factors in risk has been occasioned by reports of detrimental effects attributed to major organizational changes such as mergers, outsourcing and downsizing (e.g. Perron and Friedlander, 1996, Weick and Sutcliffe, 2001).

So far, systematic evidence on decreases in safety as a consequence of radical organizational changes is scarce (e.g. Rousseau and Libuser, 1997). In his analysis of the Longford Esso Gas Plant explosion, Hopkins (2000) identified organizational change as a contributing factor. Another example, where inadequate handling of organizational change was considered relevant as an accident cause was a refinery in California (Acusafe, 1999). Most studies focus on effects on employee attitudes and behavior (e.g. Kets de Vries and Balazs, 1997), sometimes including indicators of employee health such as sick leave (Vahtery et al., 1997). Generally, the findings demonstrate the dramatic nature of major organizational restructuring for the individuals affected, resulting in severely lowered job motivation and organizational loyalty. A newer strand of research has looked at effects of perceived job insecurity on safety. It appears from those studies that job insecurity as a consequence of layoffs will negatively affect safety compliance, accidents and injuries mainly in organizations with negative safety climate (e.g. Probst, 2004).

These studies also indicate, however, that the effects can be strongly influenced by the strategies and procedures chosen for carrying out the changes (cf. e.g. Boonstra and Bennebroek Gravenhorst, 1998). This poses a challenge for theory and practice in the field of organizational development, where up to now the focus has been on evolutionary changes. Recommendations such as strong and early employee involvement in the change process, a long-range time perspective, and complete transparence of the change process (e.g. French and Bell, 1984) have to be examined in the context of requirements stemming from radical organizational change such as fast decision making in order to help both organizational and individual reorientation (Grote and Zirngast, 2001).

The study reported here had three aims: (1) to replicate findings on the validity of an already existing instrument for assessing safety culture (Grote and Künzler, 2000), (2) to extend this instrument by developing and testing indicators for effective change management during radical organization restructuring, and (3) to study the assumed link between change management and system safety.

Section snippets

Revisiting the socio-technical model of safety culture by Grote and Künzler (2000)

There is a long-standing debate on the appropriate degree of (de-)centralization in high-risk organizations. While in industrial practice, mostly a “minimizing uncertainty approach” (Grote, 2004) is followed, assuming that through tight planning and control of operations uncertainties and thereby also risks can be designed out of the system, organization theorists have argued that a “coping with uncertainties approach” (Grote, 2004) is required, providing local actors with enough autonomy to

Indicators for effective change management

In the vast literature on organizational change and its management, general agreement can be found regarding the need to counter resistance to change and to improve the quality of change decisions by participation of the individuals affected (e.g. Ulich and Grote, 1997). However, assumptions about the timing, extent, and form of participation vary across authors and also according to the particularities of the change process in question (e.g. Boonstra and Bennebroek Gravenhorst, 1998).

Sample

The test sites all belonged to globally operating petrochemical corporations. Five of the test sites were located in the US, one in the UK and one in Sweden. Three test sites belonged to the same corporation. Plant size ranged from about 350 to 700 employees. The samples drawn for application of the questionnaire focused on representativeness with respect to the different groups of personnel, i.e. employees in operations and maintenance with and without management functions and members of the

Safety management and safety culture

The three-factor structure of the 20 operational safety items was tested by means of confirmatory factor analysis, using AMOS maximum likelihood estimation. Accounting for the nested structure of the sample, multiple group analysis was applied, testing the hypothesized three-factor model in comparison to a general factor model simultaneously in the seven sub-samples. In the analyses, the factor structure was fixed by either constraining items in all seven sub-samples to load on one of three

Change management

The newly developed questionnaire items related to change management were subjected to exploratory factor analysis. Using principal components analysis with varimax rotation for the total sample as well as for the sub-samples from the seven test sites, usually two to three factors were found based on the eigenvalue greater 1 rule. When forcing four factors based on the four content areas that were used as basis for the construction of the questionnaire, usually three of the factors were quite

Conclusion

Based on the results of this study, the use of the proposed instrument for assessing safety management, safety culture, and change management can be recommended. The structure and validity of the two previously used parts of the questionnaire concerning operational safety management and safety and design strategies could be replicated. Also, some additional evidence for the relevance of evaluating management of uncertainty as part of safety management was provided. For the newly developed part

Acknowledgements

I thank my project partners at Swiss Re Risk Engineering Services, especially Ernst Zirngast, for financial support as well as for the stimulating and fruitful cooperation. Also, my thanks go to Cuno Künzler, who collaborated with me on this project, and to Anette Wittekind, who helped with some of the statistical analyses.

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