Safety Culture Plus

While climate is difficult to define, it is easy to see and feel. According to Dan Petersen, “Probably the best definition I’ve ever heard on culture came from a worker I interviewed who stated, "Culture is the way it is around here". It’s the unwritten rules of the ballgame that the organization is playing. Culture is what everybody knows, and therefore it does not have to be stated or written down."

Safety climate reflects if safety is perceived by all employees to be a "key value" in the organization. The term "climate" and "culture" are both used here. The question is: has a safety climate (culture) been created that is conducive to adopting safe work attitudes and habits?

The concept of culture had been around long before "In Search of Excellence" was published. Dr. Rensis Likert wrote a book called "The Human Organization," where he described his research on "trying to" understand the difference in "styles" of different companies, and how these "styles" affected the bottom line. Dr. Likert coined the term "Organizational Climate”. We now call it culture.

According to Dan Petersen, Likert believed that participative management was the best kind and the most likely to produce results. Some of his contemporary management thinkers criticized him for flatly assuming that group discussion was the only way to good decision-making and thereby abandoning or ignoring the search for better techniques of problem solving or decision-making.

Likert not only researched climate; he also defined it as being excellent in the follow ten areas:

• Confidence and trust
• Interest in the subordinate’s future
• Understanding of and the desire to help overcome problems
• Training and helping the subordinate to perform better
• Teaching subordinates how to solve problems rather than giving the answer
• Giving support by making available the required physical resources
• Communicating information that the subordinate must know to do the job as well as information needed to identify more with the operation
• Seeking out and attempting to use ideas and opinions
• Approachability
• Crediting and recognizing accomplishments

Likert invented a way to measure climate with a forced choice questionnaire that he administered to employees to find out their perception of how good the company is in the ten areas. He later took the perception survey results and ran correlation studies with things like profitability, return on investment, growth, and other bottom line figures, invariably coming up with extremely high positive correlation. Apparently, climate determines results. We will discuss employee safety perceptions in a later post.

Likert’s research method was based on detailed questionnaires, asking employees a series of questions about their supervisors. He then drew up a profile of each supervisor/manager in the light of how they were viewed by the employee. From these profiles, Likert established his System 1 to 4 progressive chart of management styles as follows:

• Exploitative authoritarian: Management is by fear and coercion, where communication is top-down, decision-making is done at the top with no shared communication, and management and employees are psychologically far apart.
• Benevolent authoritarian: Management is by carrot rather than stick, but employees are still subservient; such information flows upward is mainly what the manager is thought to want to hear, and policy decisions are taken at the top, with only minor ones delegated to a lower level.
• Consultative: Management uses both carrot and stick and does try to talk to employees; communication flows both ways, but is still somewhat limited upward; important decisions are still taken top down.
• Participative: Management provides economic rewards and is concerned to get employees involved in groups capable of making decisions; it sets challenging goals and works closely with employees to encourage high performance. Communication flows easily in both directions and sideways to peers; management and employees are psychologically close. Decision-making is done through participative processes; work groups are integrated into the formal structure of the organization by creating a series of overlapping groups, each linked to the rest of the organization by a "linking pin" preferably a team leader or departmental manager, who will be a member of both group and management.

As culture became a popular management subject in the 80′s, Top Management began to look at their organizations and consider ways to "improve their culture”. In many organizations, you would find posters on the walls describing "their culture”. We know today that if the management of a company must write it down and make a poster of it, they are not describing their culture they are describing what they would see. Nobody needs the culture to be described to them. As Dan Petersen stated: Everybody knows what it "is like around here”.

References: Kennedy, Carol, Instant Management: The Best Ideas From the People Who Have Made a Difference in How We Manage, William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, 1991.

Peterson, Dan, The Challenge of Change, Creating a New Safety Culture, Implementation Guide, CoreMedia, Development, Inc., 1993, and Safety Climate, Category 19, pp. 90-92