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Clarifying cultureVerna Blewett PhD, Director, New Horizon Consulting Pty Ltd (June 2011)

PROJECT BACKGROUNDThis paper was initiated as part of the development process of the Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy 2012-2022 (Australian Strategy). This paper is intended to inform and support the Australian Strategy by articulating and analysing the existing evidence base for Safe Work Australia to consider and by identifying the strategic implications for the Australian Strategy of organisational culture.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARYThere are many myths and misconceptions about organisational culture as it relates to health and safety. Many have envisaged a discrete “safety” culture in organisations. Moreover, this is seen as being concrete, predictable and able to be managed or manipulated in some way. In fact, there is no “safety” culture that can be divorced from the wider organisational culture. An organisational culture is largely invisible, subtle, and can only be detected through indicators which are themselves not the culture. Rather the organisational culture is the context or environment within which the organisation is understood. Culture is so elusive that it does not and cannot provide a clear explanation for failures in technological systems.

There are dangers inherent in trying to manipulate something believed to be simple and predictable when in fact it is complex and unstable. However, there is evidence that certain elements can influence an organisational culture to enable and support positive health and safety outcomes.

The UK Health and Safety Executive suggests safety culture is influenced by:

management commitment and style employee involvement training and competence communication compliance with procedures, and organisational learning.

The cultural dimensions most closely associated with good work health and safety management in the Australian context have been identified as:

mindfulness workgroup cohesion trust in management organisational justice supervisor support, and role clarity.

Although organisational culture is not able to be managed, it may be malleable. This means, rather than controlling a culture as if it were an object external to the individuals within the organisation, culture can be changed from within through the strategic application of evidence-based initiatives.

To separate work health and safety culture from organisational culture and treat it differently can alienate work health and safety from key organisational decision-making.

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Employee attitude surveys fail to identify the mechanisms and systems that shape the organisation. Instead data from a combination of qualitative methods and quantitative methods should be collected, then compared and analysed to form an evidence base.

Implications for the new Australian Work Health and Safety StrategyCulture is an important and increasingly dominant aspect of the work health and safety sphere of activity. It is therefore central to achieving the 2022 Outcomes within the Australian Strategy.

The Australian Strategy must be informed by evidence and initiate actions that will lead to reduced exposure to health and safety risks in workplaces.

The following initiatives can support the achievement of the Australian Strategy vision:

Use evidence obtained through multi-method research to form the foundation for strategies for regulators and policy makers.

Adopt an evidence-based approach that promotes what is known about culture and dismisses supposition and conjecture.

Remove references to “health” and/or “safety” in association with culture and leadership.

Increase emphasis on integration of work health and safety into the business systems and processes across organisations.

Reduce the emphasis on ‘managing’ culture; instead focus on controlling risks at the source.

Differentiate between safety culture/climate and behavioural change. Build and develop the evidence base. Develop methods for capturing the knowledge

that has arisen through experience with organisational culture as it affects health and safety, and make it available for peer review.

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ContentsProject background...............................................................................................................1

Executive summary...............................................................................................................1

Introduction and background...............................................................................................4

Organisational culture and climate......................................................................................4

Safety culture and climate.....................................................................................................9

Barriers and enablers of organisational culture...............................................................17

Strategic policy implications for the new Australian Strategy........................................18

Conclusion............................................................................................................................19

References............................................................................................................................21

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INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUNDThere has been considerable debate about ‘safety culture’ in the literature, as well as among health and safety professionals; but as Hopkins suggests, “safety culture is an attractive idea…it is not, however, a straightforward idea” (Hopkins, 2002: 14). The literature shows limited agreement on the concept of safety culture. Despite a 30-year history there is no agreed definition, theory is under-developed, and research is fragmented. Perhaps the muddle of mixed concepts arises from the nature of the genesis of the term, while the introduction of the term ‘safety climate’ has further muddied the waters. Many papers on the topic commence with a statement suggesting that there is general agreement about the importance of safety culture/climate to workplace health and safety, go on to state that safety culture/climate is not well understood, and then offer a contribution that fails to add clarity to the domain because it is founded on poorly articulated first principles or theory. Whilst the offering might be interesting and thoughtful, it may add to the confusion rather than provide lucidity.

This is not just a question of semantics, epistemology or ideology that can be ignored; rather it goes to the core of thinking about workplace health and safety and the translation of knowledge into practical application in organisations. Therefore, in examining the literature this paper uses as a filter the question, “how does this contribute to knowledge, or provide evidence, that will help make workplaces healthy and safe?” It examines the broader concept of organisational culture, describes the place that workplace health and safety has in this, and considers how the current debate about safety culture and safety climate might be turned to provide insight into the features of organisations that might lead to healthy and safe workplaces and aid the development of effective interventions.

ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE AND CLIMATE

Why is organisational culture important?Ask people in any organisation about the nature of their workplace and it’s likely that they’ll be able to describe their impressions. Workers and managers alike are able to discern differences in the atmosphere of organisations or parts of organisations and may use general descriptors such as casual, warm, friendly, tense, or uninviting (or other more colourful terms) to give the impression of the workplace. They may insist that these features of the workplace make a difference to the function and outcome of the organisation (S. P. Clarke, 2006). These descriptive features of the organisation might be regarded as a manifestation of the organisational culture; in folkloric terms, ‘the way we do things around here’.

Understanding what makes organisations ‘tick’ might give insight into how they can be structured, or how they might operate, to be more effective, efficient, productive, healthy and safe. Understanding how culture operates at various levels in organisations can help to explain the everyday frustrations of organisational operation, as well as provide insight into our personal assumptions and how as individuals we might fit within, or influence, organisational culture (Schein, 2010: 2). So understanding what organisational culture is, how it is manifest, how it might be assessed (or measured) and how it might be altered or manipulated are areas of management that have had increasing focus in recent years.

Defining organisational cultureWriters on organisations come from a variety of traditions such as psychology, anthropology, sociology and organisational behaviour, and each tradition has a different way of viewing how organisations work and what contributes to them not working. Academic background influences how researchers view organisations, and how they examine organisational culture. For example, in general psychologists approach organisational culture from a positivist perspective attempting to quantify the features of culture using survey instruments, while anthropologists use qualitative approaches, such as ethnography, to describe what is observed and to look for meaning.

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Several reviews of organisational culture have been written in the last five years describing the evolution of the concept from the 1950s (Andriopoulos & Dawson, 2009), its themes (Sun, 2008), and how it applies in specific industries for example, nursing (S. P. Clarke, 2006) or rail (Weyman, Pidgeon, Jeffcott, & Walls, 2006). More recently questions have been asked about the relevance of the debate to organisations that are structured on non-traditional lines; for example those that engage a contingent workforce, where contracting is a feature, or where shift work predominates (Bellot, 2011).

In their wide-ranging work on the theory of organisations, Mary Jo Hatch and Ann Cunliffe (2006) describe the rise of the socially-constructed concept of organisational culture from its wider anthropological and sociological roots in human culture. They examine the definitions of organisational culture that arose in the mid-twentieth century onwards and note that while it is the concept of ‘sharing’ that is common to them all, ‘sharing’ itself can have contradictory meanings.

‘Sharing’ can be seen as developing unity (Schein, 2010) with shared norms, values, assumptions and beliefs, along with the so-called observable ‘artefacts’ of shared behaviour. Schein has moved little from his early views on organisational culture and most recently defines it is as:

… a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems. (Schein, 2010: 18).

This definition while compelling at first reading views organisational culture as something that is unitary, agreed, and relatively static; develops over time in a stable organisation and can be passed on to newcomers. The relevance of this to 21st Century organisations is debatable. The changing labour market and increasing use of novel organisational forms with distributed organisation members, work from home, and work in ‘the cloud’ may change the need for and the capacity to reach agreement on cultural norms.

Other theorists emphasise that ‘sharing’ can also be a form of fragmentation (as in sharing a pizza) and therefore place emphasis on differences (Meyerson & Martin, 1987), asserting symbols and stories can demonstrate this (Morgan, 1997). The concept of shifting subcultures in organisations arises from theories of culture as fragmentation (implying conflicted differences) and differentiation (implying useful differences). For example Hofstede (1998) described three distinct subcultures in an insurance company: a professional, an administrative and a customer-interface subculture. “The cultural rifts between the subcultures could be readily recognised in the company’s practice, and had tangible consequences” (Hofstede, 1998). While some interpretations of organisational culture seek to explain unity in organisations, others use organisational culture to describe subcultures with varying degrees of fragmentation and differentiation in organisations that explain and perhaps encourage diversity (S. P. Clarke, 2006; Meyerson & Martin, 1987).

Schein defines culture on four levels: macrocultures, organisational cultures, subcultures and microcultures (Schein, 2010: 2). Macroculture refers to national cultures based on ethnicity or religion but might also include occupational groups such as medicine and law that exist internationally. Macroculture provides the overarching context for organisational culture. Organisational culture (or corporate culture) he suggests exists in “private, public, non-profit and government organisations” (Schein, 2010: 2). Subcultures are also organisational and he defines these as occupational groups that exist within organisations that have their own specific values and norms. Microcultures he describes as existing within “small, coherent units…that cut across occupational groups” (Schein, 2010: 2).

At this point it is interesting to note the terms subculture and microculture are used reasonably consistently in the management literature to refer to groups of people with common traits or objectives. It is rarely used to describe areas of management action or responsibility (such as finance or marketing) in the way ‘safety culture’ has developed.

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Theorists are drawing on an increasingly wide range of metaphors, including music and literature, to describe organisational culture and to investigate further questions about how it might be influenced (Hatch & Cunliffe, 2006: 213); thus the field remains fluid. Current explorations seek the relationship between culture, power and influence, and leadership (Lok & Crawford, 1999; Schein, 2010) that may lead to new theories of organisations. Bryson suggests there is a need to use theories of organisational culture to improve working lives by examining dominant, emergent and residual cultures following organisational change (Bryson, 2008), while Morrill and Raz examine organisations as societies or communities of practice (Morrill, 2008; Raz, 2007). These shifts in the theoretical development of the concept of organisational culture may well have application for improving work health and safety.

Organisational climateOrganisational climate is perceived as a manifestation of organisational culture, but it is another construct that is unclear in the literature. Its origins were in the work of Kurt Lewin in the 1930s (as cited in Bellot 2011) and preceded the coining of the term ‘organisational culture’ by Pettigrew in 1979 (as cited in Bellot 2011). The most commonly quoted definition was coined by Tagiuri and Litwin (1968) and states that organisational climate is

…the relatively enduring organizational environment that (a) is experienced by the occupants, (b) influences their behavior, and (c) can be described in terms of the values of a particular set of characteristics or attributes of the environment (Tagiuri & Litwin, 1968: 25).

The similarity to definitions of organisational culture is obvious, so it is unsurprising there is considerable muddle in the literature over these intertwined concepts. Other authors conclude the two concepts “address the same phenomenon” (Denison, 1996) and there is significant fit between the two concepts (Yahyagil, 2006). Schein has been influential in defining climate as “…only a surface manifestation of culture”; a group of ‘artefacts’ or constructs that are visible and measurable (Schein, 1990) that include documents such as organisation charts and statements of policy. More recently he narrowed his definition of organisational climate to the

…feeling that is conveyed in a group by the physical layout and the way in which members of the organisation interact with each other, with customers, or with other outsiders (Schein, 2010: 15).

Indeed, he paints ‘climate’ as one of a list of 11 “observable events and underlying forces” together forming an anthropological model of organisational culture (Schein, 2010: 14-16). At best ‘climate’ might be regarded as a proxy for culture, but there is little clarity in the literature about the validity or reliability of this approach. Nonetheless, the construction of climate as the behavioural manifestation of culture underpins behaviourist approaches to work health and safety. Can manipulation of these surface manifestations (as demonstrated in individual behaviour) lead to the development of healthy and safe workplaces? The warning about this use comes from Schein himself:

Some culture analysts see climate as the equivalent to culture, but it is better thought of as the product of some of the underlying assumptions and is, therefore, a manifestation of the culture … it is both easy to observe and very difficult to decipher. (Schein, 2010: 24).

All in all these are slippery concepts; as Schein warns us, at the level of artefacts (including climate) there is considerable ambiguity in interpretation by observers—essentially, interpretation of cultural artefacts (including climate) is not possible unless the observer “has experienced the culture at the deeper level of assumptions” (Schein, 2010:24). They are only able to be known by those in the know.

Both culture and climate are deemed to share constructs such as leadership (Al-Shammari, 1992), organisational socialisation (Taormina, 2008), employee participation (Nerdinger, 2008) and effectiveness (Aydin & Ceylan, 2009). So it seems that the culture-climate debate is increasingly arid, as Bellot summarises:

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In fact, it is clear that both culture and climate attempt to address the interplay between individuals and their surroundings, but it becomes a circular debate to determine which produces and/or affects the other (Bellot, 2011).

Most recently the literature describes the difference between organisational culture and organisational climate as a matter of research method. Culture tends to be researched qualitatively (with anthropological methods) while climate tends to be researched quantitatively (through surveys) (Asif, 2011).

For our purposes, the debate needs to turn to the question “what makes a difference?” and if that is culture, climate or a combination of these and other constructs, then as people who want to influence improvement in the lives of working women and men, this is what needs to be identified and addressed. This paper takes the middle ground and uses the terms ‘culture’ and ‘climate’ (both organisational and ‘safety’) interchangeably.

Organisational culture and its relationship to work health and safetyWhere does work health and safety fit into an organisation’s culture? Is the management of work health and safety different from other areas of management such as accounting and sales? Empirical evidence suggests this is not the case. In their 3-year examination of 13 Australian small and medium enterprises, Blewett and Shaw (2001) found that the style of management of work health and safety was reflected more generally in the strategic choices that were made in organisations. They were able to identify three categories of work health and safety performance (proactive, reactive and transitional) in the responses of the enterprises to change and found the features differentiating one category of enterprise from another applied to other areas of enterprise activity, such as production, quality and dealing with cost pressures. The primary, cultural features that differentiated the organisations were: autonomy, job control and a culture of respect, and the integration of work health and safety into decision-making (Blewett & Shaw, 2001: 51).

Westrum defined culture as “the organisation’s pattern of response to the problems and opportunities it encounters” (Westrum, 2004). By examining information flows in response to trouble in organisations in the health sector, he found a predictive relationship between organisational culture and safety. In his analysis he identified three categories of organisational culture: pathological (focussed on personal needs), bureaucratic (focussed on departmental needs) and generative (focussed on the organisation’s mission). However he warns the relationship is not definitive and proof is hard to find (Westrum, 2004).

There is evidence management systems governing work health and safety (such as the development of policy, employee participation, training, communication, planning, and control and review) act as a manifestation of organisational culture (Fernández-Muñiz, Montes-Peón, & Vázquez-Ordás, 2007; Zohar & Luria, 2005). Links have also been found between organisational culture and risk management in organisations. Researchers correlated the results of an organisational culture survey that looked at mechanistic versus organic-style cultures with another survey designed to gauge the implementation of enterprise risk management and found “organic cultures tend to make greater progress” with risk management. They concluded organisations with organic approaches to risk management (defined as involving strong leadership and worker participation) tend to progress more effectively than traditional rule-bound (mechanistic) organisations and this should influence how managers set about dealing with risk management (Kimbrough & Componation, 2009).

Other researchers, examining the metal working industry in Turkey, showed correlations between dimensions of organisational culture and firm performance and effectiveness. Customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, organisational commitment, and financial and growth performance were considered indicators of firm performance and effectiveness. These showed significant correlations with a range of cultural dimensions that may have implications for work health and safety including “involvement, collaboration, transmission of information, learning, care

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about clients, strategic direction, reward and incentive system, systems of control, communication, coordination and integration” (Aydin & Ceylan, 2009). These relationships are likely to be complex, and it is difficult to assert cause and effect, but the authors attempt to build a model and conclude that high levels of employee satisfaction require considerable organisational commitment and a customer-focus that is built on good communication and coordination. These features require strategic, big-picture thinking to implement, which in turn contributes to organisational effectiveness and performance (Aydin & Ceylan, 2009).

Reporting on the use of an instrument designed to measure organisational climate with respect to creativity and change, Isaksen et al (2001) identify organisational climate as the “intervening variable that affects individual and organisational performance” and they describe organisational culture as

…the cement that holds an organisation together… [organisational] culture determines the worldview or mindset for those who belong. It influences the way people behave, particularly how they respond to surprise, ambiguity, creativity, and change (Isaksen, Lauer, Ekvall, & Britz, 2001).

They propose a model that identifies nine dimensions associated with creativity and innovation in organisations: challenge and involvement, freedom, trust/openness, idea time, playfulness/humour, conflict, idea support, debate, and risk-taking. Knowing what helps and hinders creativity and innovation in organisations may have applicability for work health and safety in terms of problem-solving to reduce risk.

There has been considerable research effort into what makes organisations tick; those features of organisational culture or climate that might contribute to the way organisations operate, their effectiveness and their performance. However, research gaps remain in the relationship between the various features that have been identified and in particular, where work health and safety fits in the organisational scheme of things. Further work needs to be done to elucidate these relationships, even though they are likely to be complex.

Managing organisational culturePertinent to this paper is the debate still raging around the assertion that organisational culture can be managed; that is, the concept of organisational culture as a control mechanism within organisations. Does culture influence behaviour (through shared values et cetera)? If so, can organisational values be instilled, selected for, or manipulated to ensure the desired behaviour? Or do patterns of organisational culture arise from the deeply-held and difficult to influence beliefs and assumptions that are brought into the organisation by the individuals that make it up? If so, are these unlikely to be readily altered or can a set of overarching values be built (Woodall, 1996)? Hatch and Cunliffe (2006) provide wise advice on these questions, warning that although it might be reasonable to be concerned about organisational culture, trying to interfere with it can have unpredictable outcomes. They advise that we

… need to give up thinking of culture as an entity and [trying] to understand what it does. Instead, think of culture as a context for meaning making and interpretation. Do not think of trying to manage culture, other people’s meanings and interpretations are highly unmanageable, think instead about trying to culturally manage your organisation, that is, manage your organisation with cultural awareness of the multiplicity of meaning that will be made of you and your efforts (Hatch & Cunliffe, 2006: 235 – original emphasis).

The importance of this advice cannot be overstated. The perception organisational culture is something that can be applied (like a Band-Aid) to an organisation may well be like tilting at windmills; a pernicious objective driving organisations to spend considerable effort and resources on conflicting targets that may not, in the end, help to improve the working environment or make workplaces healthy and safe. The use of organisational culture as a form of control has been observed to have unexpected and negative outcomes for organisations. This is particularly so where organisational restructuring has been accompanied by stated expectations of behavioural

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change encouraged with sanctions, including increased surveillance, reduced autonomy and decreased job security (Harris & Ogbonna, 2002; Ogbonna & Wilkinson, 2003).

Attempts to control and manage something as intangible and evasive as organisational culture may well result in undesirable and unexpected outcomes. Organisational culture may not be able to be managed at all but may be malleable—although this may be both difficult and ethically questionable (Harris & Ogbonna, 2002). Woodall’s two-stage prescription for ethical cultural change in organisations still rings true 15 years on, and though lengthy, is worth quoting here:

First, if organizational management consciously wishes to adopt values that proclaim its purpose, then it has to enable an internal dialogue to take place over what these should be and their relationship to wider social values … individual loyalty to the organisation needs to be tempered with loyalty to family and immediate work group, and above all the organisation’s commitment to the individual. Culture management that disregards this in favour of a greedy demand for a one-sided commitment is a denial of the very thing it pursues—a sense of community and belonging. The requirement for greater effort needs to be met with equitable treatment, not only in terms of rewards, but in terms of what might be the spin-offs for family and personal life, colleagues and the burdens for a society at large. Second, organisational management has to create the conditions in which such a dialogue can take place. Honesty in vision and direction, openness and fairness in dealings with employees, tolerance of deviant views and security—all of these could be possible, even though the organisation is constrained by concerns for share price, public image, and confidentiality in relation to competitors. However, without this any culture change has a hollow ring. Both of these requirements appear to be very elusive in the current situation of managing corporate culture change … culture management might not [only] be an exercise in deception and manipulation, but a self-deluding fantasy too (Woodall, 1996).

As Antonsen (2010) suggests, “organizational cultures are produced locally, and … managers cannot expect to be able to shape organisational culture at their discretion”. Instead an approach to organisational culture and organisational change that accepts there will be varied points of view, conflict, and confusion in an organisation provides a significant, but achievable challenge to managers. By allowing the variety of opinion to persist and develop in an organisation, many points of view can be effectively tapped to deal with problems, challenges and daily organisational frustrations. There is a greater likelihood the resulting decisions will be more full and capable of implementation because they do not deny difference, but incorporate it (Weisbord, 1987).

SAFETY CULTURE AND CLIMATEThe field of culture and climate in organisations is further muddied by the terms ‘safety culture’ and ‘safety climate’. Safety climate was first proposed in 1980 as a concept measured by a 40-item survey to reflect “employees’ perceptions about the relative importance of safe conduct in their occupational behaviour” (Zohar, 1980). The term ‘safety culture’ emerged in 1986 in response to the Chernobyl disaster (International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 1986) with expansion on the subject in later years. The IAEA suggested, “ultimately…the effectiveness of the organization’s safety culture should be reflected in the performance of the facility” (Sorensen, 2002). These initiatives have led to the development of a new field of enquiry, arguably unique in the literature on organisations.

While organisational subcultures have been well theorised and studied, as outlined above they refer to groups of people in organisations that have in common traits or operational objectives, rather than areas of management concern. No other domain of organisational life has been identified as having a cultural life of its own. Given the importance to organisational survival of areas such as finance, marketing, operations, and even human resources, why have we not seen a similar level of enquiry and the development of literature on the culture of these domains? This is indeed a curious phenomenon.

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Despite these reservations, there is a growing body of literature about safety culture and safety climate with assertions about what they are, the differences between the two (Zhang, Wiegmann, von Thaden, Sharma, & Mitchell, 2002), the relationship between the two (Teo & Feng, 2009), how they might be measured or assessed (Shannon & Norman, 2009), their relationship to behaviour and how ‘safety culture might be acquired’ (Hudson, 1999), and what impact they might have on work health and safety (S. Clarke, 2006; Hale & Hovden, 1998). Zhang et al (2002) acknowledged the degree of chaos in the concepts of safety culture and safety climate and proposed a common nomenclature and a series of hybrid definitions in an attempt to move the field forward:

Safety culture: The enduring value and priority placed on worker and public safety by everyone in every group at every level of an organization. It refers to the extent to which individuals and groups will commit to personal responsibility for safety; act to preserve, enhance and communicate safety concerns; strive to actively learn, adapt and modify (both individual and organisational) behaviour based on lessons learned from mistakes; and be rewarded in a manner consistent with these values.

Safety climate: The temporal state measure of safety culture, subject to commonalities among individual perceptions of the organization. It is therefore situationally based, refers to the perceived state of safety at a particular place at a particular time, is relatively unstable, and subject to change depending on the features of the current environment or prevailing conditions. (Zhang, et al., 2002).

Zhang et al’s proposed definitions were based on a review of the literature that assumed safety culture/climate to be instrumental (functionalist) in nature, unified and shared. But there are other views; safety culture/climate remains contested constructs (Guldenmund 2000). Indeed, the discussion about forms of organisational culture/climate, discussed above is mirrored in the safety culture/climate literature (Richter & Koch, 2004; Sorensen, 2002).

Recently researchers have increasingly called for a new view of safety culture that locates it within the literature on organisational culture (Bentley & Tappin, 2010; Nævestad, 2008; Silbey, 2009; Tharaldsen & Haukelid, 2009). Such approaches treat culture as process rather than as an entity, taking an holistic look at what happens in organisations (Tharaldsen & Haukelid, 2009). The importance of maintaining many perspectives and incorporating reflective practice in the examination of safety culture is advocated by Nævestad (2008) who dismissed the idea of a unitary view of safety culture. More recently he framed his discussion in terms of a functionalist approach to safety culture (something the organisation has) versus an interpretive approach (something the organisation is) and suggested that lessons about safety culture could be drawn from socio-technical systems and the experience of high reliability organisations (Nævestad, 2009). Silbey asserts an instrumental view of culture has little value in the prevention of accidents and exhorts researchers to “explore the features of complex systems” that have been left out of the discussions on safety culture. These include explorations of difference in organisations, of conflict, matters to do with power, influence and authority, and how competing interests in organisations might have legitimacy and the need to co-exist (Antonsen, 2009; Silbey, 2009).

In the last decade or so safety culture/climate has been used as a diagnosis to describe incident causation; in common parlance, that is, ‘… the incident was caused by a poor safety culture’. This appears to be the newest form of short-hand labelling of a diagnosis that in earlier times may have been ‘human error’, ‘unsafe behaviour’, or ‘careless worker’. Most crucially it is unhelpful in determining corrective actions as it does not identify the root cause (Rosness, 2003). Rather than holistically investigating the cultural aspects of the organisation, behavioural responses have developed. Behaviour-based safety approaches encourage a behaviourist focus on individuals (usually the lowest workers in the hierarchy) and Pavlovian or Skinnerian attempts to change attitudes and therefore observable behaviour through reward and punishment. There are many conditions for success of behaviour-based safety not the least of which is the reliance on a “view of humans as controlled by external rewards, and free will as a figment of our imagination” (Tharaldsen & Haukelid, 2009). Even a cursory reflection on human behaviour reveals more

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complex motivators than instinctual or learned responses to rewards such as personal and cultural moral codes, personal goals and self-investment, altruism, and the desire to care for others (Leontiev, 2008; Maslow, 1943; Neher, 1991).

The need for a more balanced approach to the concept of culture is well-argued by Tharaldsen and Haukelid (2009) who observe much of the literature on safety culture is instrumental and behavioural in nature and does not address important cultural perspectives at all well. They contend while a behavioural approach may provide part of the work health and safety story, it should not be considered on its own and out of context. Giving behaviour the spotlight means the overall view of an organisation’s culture is diminished and much important information, especially tacit and cultural information, is left in the dark. Reliance on a behaviour-based approach is necessarily superficial because it ignores the higher-level functions and drivers of behaviour. Instead a more rounded approach is necessary to be meaningful and valid and to inform effective interventions.

The investigation of organisational culture and the place of work health and safety must be diverse and holistic if it is to be useful in providing a clear picture enabling the development of interventions to improve the workplace. In particular, the distribution of power and influence needs to be considered because “some people have more influence than others, and some are closer to the risk than others: safety and risk are not equally distributed” (Tharaldsen & Haukelid, 2009). The narrow focus of the behaviour-based safety approach cannot provide an accurate assessment of the state of work health and safety and organisational culture. This requires a mix of quantitative (or technological) methods and qualitative (or organic) methods that take into account the diversity of the whole organisation.

Tharaldsen and Haukelid postulate a four-field model (see Figure 1) that suggests a balance in the different ways of dealing with work health and safety incorporating behavioural approaches, cultural approaches, tacit (implied but not expressed) knowledge, and explicit and visible events (Tharaldsen & Haukelid, 2009). They acknowledge the model is likely to be a “coarse simplification” where there is overlap between the fields, but they offer it as a step towards clarity and to provide an overarching context for cultural understanding.

Cultural

Taci

t H

idde

n Learning, Socialisation

Symbols, Images

Explicit VisibleActs of

habitsSingle acts and events

BehaviouralFigure 1. A balanced approach to safety (Tharaldsen & Haukelid, 2009).

The most recognisable field is the explicit behavioural. This is the field where observable behaviours that can be counted lie; such as those that behaviour-based safety is concerned with. For example, failure to use personal protective equipment where it is demanded by rules and procedures, or failure to use equipment as specified in the rules. However, risks associated with long latency, unpredictability or invisibility, such as chemical exposures and psychosocial risks, can be missed. Changes in these areas may be difficult to measure, or the relationship between cause and effect may be less evident than is the case with simple, observable behaviours. Nonetheless, such risks may be of great significance for people’s health and wellbeing in the long term, and may have significant consequences for the organisation.

The factors operating in the background but ultimately leading to the formation of observable habits fall into the tacit behavioural field. These include well-intentioned incentive programs designed to improve safety that can have unintended consequences leading to habitual behaviours with long-term effects. For example, tying incentives to low injury rates might be sincerely intended to produce a safe working environment but is more likely to lead to counter-

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productive, habitual under or non-reporting. These background factors need to be understood if effective interventions to improve work health and safety are to be developed and implemented.

Processes of power and influence are embodied in the tacit cultural field. Unequal power distribution, the influential individuals at all levels in the organisation, and the uneven distribution of risk across the organisation may all impact on the way changes in work health and safety are seen and managed. Change in this field may take time to learn and socialisation may take time to take effect, so-called “slow change”, but eventually they become embodied in “the way we do things”. Because they become deeply embedded in the organisation’s functioning, they can be very powerful influences. For example, a work health and safety Committee concerned work health and safety is poorly communicated may agree to introduce a new rule for communication between employees and work health and safety committee members involving short ‘work health and safety exchanges’ with small groups of people throughout the organisation immediately after lunch on the last Friday of the month. For the first few months some people forget about the rule and the meeting, but within a year the time and date is institutionalised and people muster at their meeting place at the appointed time without reminder, and use the time effectively.

The observable symbols of culture are found in the explicit cultural field. Statements of vision and values, cartoon characters acting as mascots for safety, newsletters, logos, procedures and policies that are influenced by organisational culture sit neatly in this field. These explicit cultural symbols provide the flavour of the organisation and can dictate and guide behaviour. For example, a cultural analysis would focus on the commitment of managers to work health and safety which is accepted as being an important influence on organisational culture. Managers modelling appropriate behaviours, determining decisions that are in accordance with the company’s stated vision and values, and actually doing what they say they should do would demonstrate this.

The application of this four-field model to organisational investigation and evaluation would go some way to improving the development of interventions for organisational change. However, it is not a recipe for ‘managing safety culture’. The difficulties in managing organisational culture/climate, discussed above, are mirrored in the domain of managing safety culture/climate. Here we are warned about the importance of bringing the focus back to improving the workplace, rather than engaging in continual re-assessments that do not lead to action (Silbey, 2009). There is also the suggestion that managers should be “a little more modest” in their attempts to manage safety culture (Haukelid, 2008).

The long history of the concept of organisational culture and the research that surrounds it has reached a cautious point in its development. The advice we have seen earlier exhorts us to consider organisational culture as providing the context and meaning for decision-making instead of trying to manage culture. Accepting and working with the variety of views that might exist in the organisation is likely to provide effective and predictable outcomes because the differences are not ignored, but are part of the solution.

In contrast we see that the 30 years of literature on safety culture/climate remains fragmented and disconnected. What can the proponents of safety culture/climate learn from the larger research base on organisational culture? What could be learned by examining the place work health and safety has in organisational culture and the actions necessary to improve work health and safety, instead of continuing to investigate safety culture/climate? The former would grow from a world view of organisations where work health and safety is part of organisational life, rather than the view that work health and safety is a separate, specialist area with a life of its own. What impact on work health and safety might there be in reframing the organisational culture literature in this way?

Safety culture as a “solution”The uncertain nature of the concept of safety culture/climate is clearly evident. It is also clear even with the best will in the world the idea an organisation can manage safety culture can be

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challenged. At best organisations may find that effort and budgets spent on this endeavour have limited impact but may demonstrate where attention needs to be placed. At worst the impact of attempts to fix safety culture may have unexpected negative outcomes or may direct firms away from controlling known risks at source; it maybe an ironic form of goal displacement. In a sense, behavioural norms and expectations are used as a proxy for ‘culture’. This might be reasonable given it’s hard to measure what can’t be observed, but do these observable features really represent culture? How much is this effort an example of goal displacement; that is, putting the effort in to measure culture instead of rethinking the design of equipment (Rollenhagen, 2010).

The UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE) provides a simple summary of the stance that the UK regulator has taken on safety culture. There, safety culture is seen as a subset of organisational culture and this broader focus is recommended. Organisational culture is regarded as a means of capturing the attention of managers and workers alike so that it provides a framework for advice. This is a practical way to use a contested area to help move the UK towards the goal of building healthy and safe workplaces. Some useful advice is found on the website that is presented in accessible language (Health and Safety Executive, 2011). It reminds the reader:

embarking on culture change is a lengthy process, “talking to your workforce” or using the HSE’s own readily available tools are a good

starting place to investigate the phenomenon any survey method is only a starting point and taking action and giving feedback are

actually necessary a step-wise approach with a focus on particular dimensions of culture such as

leadership, competence or communication can be an effective means of engendering change

it is critical to have a whole-of-organisation focus, not only the workforce but also senior management should be prepared to be “examined and challenged” and

suitably skilled and independent third parties can help provide guidance but it is “important to retain ownership of the process and work in partnership, and acquire the knowledge and skills to continue the work independently” (Health and Safety Executive, 2011).

An evidence baseSafety culture/climate is an unusual domain in that the literature is largely empirically based, rather than theoretically based. So the examples of research on safety culture conducted in organisations are growing rapidly. However as Tharaldsen and Haukelid (2009) observe, the research is largely conducted from an instrumental standpoint, that is, starting from the premise safety culture is something that can be applied to fix organisations. Such research is limited in value because it is typically based on a narrow view of safety culture. It tends to rely on the statistical analysis of surveys used to determine key dimensions of safety culture with a subsequent rearrangement of items and re-labelling of dimensions but often with limited information about the impact the work has on health and safety (DeJoy, Gershon, & Schaffer, 2004; Fernández-Muñiz, et al., 2007; Isaksen, et al., 2001; Torp & Grøgaard, 2009). Instead they recommend a multi-method approach to determine interventions to improve organisations—and the same advice might be applied to research. As they suggest, such an approach gives

…a fuller picture of why rules and procedures are not always followed, or why well-intended incentives might have paradoxical, undesired consequences (Tharaldsen & Haukelid, 2009: original emphasis).

Silbey agrees and goes on to describe safety culture as “a supplement, the detritus of social transactions” that is so elusive that it does not and cannot provide a clear explanation for failures in technological systems. The inevitable result is that instrumental research leads to and

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encourages explanations of operator error and unsafe behaviour and the scapegoating that accompanies this (Silbey, 2009).

The conflation of safety culture with behavioural modification through behaviour-based safety is a more recent outcome of the rise of the importance of safety culture (Tharaldsen & Haukelid, 2009). There is a dearth of research that reinforces the complex anthropological, sociological and social psychological views of culture as it pertains to work health and safety. There is room for further theorising that finds a place for work health and safety in the more general organisational culture literature. Such an approach would have the added benefit of helping to push work health and safety into mainstream management decision-making rather than encouraging further specialisation.

Typologies of culture and organisational changeThe concept of safety culture is open to interpretation so theoretical models and typologies are useful to guide and systematise thinking. Blewett and Shaw’s (2001) model of reactive, transitional and proactive organisations, and Westrum’s (2004) typology of pathological, bureaucratic and generative organisations were introduced above. Each model was grounded in observations of organisations and proposed as a means of differentiating between broad classes of organisations based on identifiable cultural characteristics that contributed to safe workplaces. These models are descriptive, not directive in nature. While deficiencies in key features in an organisation might suggest interventions, these authors suggest such conclusions should be treated with caution because the relationships between cultural characteristics and safe workplaces are complex and contextual.

Reason added to Westrum’s model with two additions to the typology (Reason, 1997), while Hudson et al have added further to this by proposing an “evolutionary framework” (Hudson, 1999, 2007; Lawrie, Parker, & Hudson, 2006; Parker, Lawrie, & Hudson, 2006), a development and maturation model of safety culture that identifies key features at each of six steps in a linear progression from pathological to generative. A pathological culture cares less about safety and more about being caught. The organisation moves to a reactive culture in response to incidents and becomes calculative (or bureaucratic) when it is rule-bound and follows set processes for safety, but in a calculated rather than reflective manner. The organisation becomes a proactive culture when it starts to anticipate problems and deal with them before they arise, while a generative culture is innovative, not rule-bound, and incorporates safety in its total operation. The model was fleshed out following interviews with 26 company executives in the oil and gas industry (Parker, et al., 2006). The model provides a useful description of different organisational cultures but has some failings in its application. It relies on a unitary approach to organisational culture and does not consider the influence of competing sub-cultures that exist in organisations. It may have the appearance of validity from the perspective of executive management but its validity for others in the organisational hierarchy has not been tested. The model is used to provide a prescription for organisational change based on an instrumental view of safety culture (Hudson, 2007) that is currently under challenge.

Hudson et al’s prescription of an organisational change ladder that delivers “a safety culture” is in sharp contrast to Dawson’s (2003) observations of organisational change—far less a ladder more like a snakes and ladders game, complete with uncertainty and unexpected movements in different directions. Dawson views organisational change as a non-linear process that does not lend itself to prescriptive recipes for change and advises readers to broaden their awareness of the complexity of the change process (Dawson, 2003: 173). He stresses there is “nothing so impracticable as a packaged, prescriptive, linear change initiative” (Dawson, 2003: 175). Ten practical lessons emerge from his extensive work in organisations that can be applied to the place of work health and safety in organisational culture. In summary:

1. There are no simple solutions or prescriptions for organisational change. It is important to be aware of the limitations of step-wise organisational change packages.

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2. Change strategies should be sensitive to organisational politics and the context in which change is to take place.

3. Major change takes time, requires planning and revisions of plans. It is unlikely to be smooth sailing.

4. Different people and groups in the organisation experience change differently. It is important to continually reflect and question assumptions along the way.

5. Learn from the diversity of views in the organisation and from varied experiences—do not rely on stories of successful change to direct decisions.

6. Provide adequate training to employees so their skills match the requirements of change initiatives.

7. Have consistent and ongoing communication with employees and be aware of the politics of communication.

8. Be aware of the changing external and internal context for change and modify the process in response to the context.

9. Organisational change is a political process and this shapes the way change occurs as well as the results.

10. Organisational change is not static, instead the “substance, context and politics of change interlock and overlap over time” (Dawson, 2003: 173-175).

Models of safety culture may be valuable tools helping organisations ask the right questions and help to direct reflection on the way the organisation operates. This may help determine where to put effort and how to place priorities for action. However, there is a need to be cautious about the mechanistic application of such models because while they may provide useful descriptors, there is little evidence that they can be used as prescriptions that lead to better organisational health.

Assessing (measuring) cultureWhy measure culture? If as so many authors assert, culture is the basis of organisational performance, then the strategic reason for measuring culture will be to illuminate our understanding and improve performance. But perhaps the first question to pose should be, ‘is culture measurable?’ Those authors who take the instrumental view of culture see a link between values, attitudes and behaviours, and health and safety outcomes. But the mechanism of this link, how this is operationalised, is less clear.

Safety culture/climate is most frequently measured in terms of individual responses to attitude surveys; so many instruments to measure safety culture have been developed. Constructs have been named and defined with various subtle variations and rearrangement of items, surveys administered, measurements taken, validation asserted and the construct is then regarded as stable—that is, something that is likely to occur in a similar fashion in all organisations. As a result developing, testing and validating measurement instruments for safety culture/climate dominate the literature (Silbey, 2009) and are a common tool of trade for consultants and researchers alike. But does this individualised approach to the measurement of culture actually measure culture? For the purposes of this present discussion, we should also ask, “can surveys contribute to making workplaces healthy and safe?” Can they, for instance, reliably identify where improvements can be made and what the interventions should be that might lead to improvement? The same warnings, outlined in the previous section, about reliance on surveys to provide evidence about safety culture for research and theoretical development apply here. Using surveys alone is flawed because it only gives part of the story and from one perspective.

Using a multi-method model to “decipher” the essence of an organisation is likely to give more reliable and valid data about organisational culture, if only because varied views are accessed (Schein, 2010: 177-193) and it prevents over-simplification (Bellot, 2011; Tsoukas & Hatch, 2001).

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The UK Health and Safety Executive recommends that employee attitude surveys should not be the sole method of data collection because they fail to identify the mechanisms and systems that shape the organisation (Health and Safety Executive, 2005). Instead, data from a combination of qualitative methods (observations, focus groups, interviews, document analysis, historical information reviews and case studies) and quantitative methods (surveys and questionnaires) should be collected and triangulated. Assessments should be made across the organisation, within and across departments and teams and covering different organisational levels (Health and Safety Executive, 2002). An evaluative approach such as this can provide the background data that informs the participative development of interventions to improve work health and safety (Blewett & Shaw, 2008).

Whatever methods are used to collect and analyse data, the relationship of the assessor to the organisation will play a role in the nature of the assessment. For example, an evaluator from the regulator, a consultant engaged to help the organisation, and an internal organisational development officer will each have different approaches, may be viewed differently by organisational participants, may access different data, and may interpret those data differently. On top of this, the academic background of the assessor may play a role in both data collection and interpretation of the data; for example an organisational psychologist, anthropologist, sociologist and management scientist will each come to the task with a different frame of reference.

Regardless of who is engaged in assessing organisational culture, there are ethical considerations that should not be ignored. These are principally about making public what is normally private, and the potential to do harm to individuals and organisations in the process. The risks will vary with the nature of the assessment, the purpose of the assessment and the assessor themselves. Schein (2010: 186-191) provides a useful discussion of ethical considerations in cultural assessment for the insider and outsider to take into account. The “soft guidelines” that accompany the use of the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire (COPSOQ)1 is a useful set of working rules. These 10 principles were established to encourage ethical use of the COPSOQ in workplaces and could be adapted to culture surveys by simply substituting the words ‘organisational culture’ for ‘psychosocial work environment’:

1. Never start a survey of the psychosocial work environment unless there is a clear intention of taking action if indicated.

2. Answering the questionnaire is voluntary, but a response rate below 60% is unsatisfactory and a sign of poor psychological climate at the workplace.

3. All respondents are anonymous, if scores are calculated for groups of less than 15 persons, all group members should give their active consent.

4. All employees have the right to see and discuss the results.

5. Management as well as supervisors and workers should participate and be committed during the whole process.

6. It is important to distinguish between basic conditions of work that are “part of the job” and factors that could be changed. Do not try to change what cannot be changed and do not accept what should be changed.

7. There are no standard solutions to the problems. Solutions should be developed locally and integrated in the other activities of the organisation aiming at increased productivity and better quality.

1 This survey instrument is used internationally to examine the psychosocial working environment and has many constructs in common with safety culture/climate survey instruments. But it is the soft guidelines, rather than the questionnaire content, that are considered here.

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8. If interventions are made, it is a good idea to repeat the survey after 1-2 years in order to see if the intended improvements have occurred.

9. Many workplaces will benefit from surveys with regular intervals as part of the overall concept of the “learning organisation” and “development work”.

10. The survey results should be seen as a tool for dialogue and development—not as a ‘grade book’ (Kristensen, 2011).

There are gaps in the knowledge when it comes to cultural approaches to work health and safety. The tools and methods used to assess organisational culture and work health and safety are evolving with our understanding of the area and more needs to be done in this domain. For example, assumptions about the relationship between cultural aspects of an organisation and observable safety behaviours have not been validated with longitudinal data.

BARRIERS AND ENABLERS OF ORGANISATIONAL CULTUREThis paper has ranged widely across the literature on culture in organisations and identifies areas where organisational culture might contribute to enhancing healthy and safe working environments. So what are the key barriers to and enablers of an organisational culture that supports and enhances a healthy and safe working environment? There is a wide range of dimensions of organisational culture that appear in the empirical and theoretical literature that are said to contribute to work health and safety. For example the UK Health and Safety Executive suggest that safety culture is influenced by:

management commitment and style employee involvement training and competence communication compliance with procedures, and organisational learning (Health and Safety Executive, 2011).

Engineering a ‘just culture’ where people are able to report error and be treated with respect, rather than sanctions, was identified early in the literature as contributing to positive organisational culture—although the difficulties in achieving this are significant (Reason, 1998). Recent Australian research in the NSW mining industry, Digging Deeper (Shaw et al. 2008), provided empirical evidence of the cultural dimensions most closely associated with good work health and safety management in the Australian context, namely:

mindfulness [as described by (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001)] workgroup cohesion trust in management organisational justice supervisor support, and role clarity (Shaw et al., 2008).

These identified features are enablers if actioned well, but can be barriers to effective work health and safety if not addressed well. This work built on earlier work that described the aetiology of incidents as a flow from organisational culture (Atmosphere) to incidents (Targets), the ASET process. In this model the nature of organisational culture determines the nature of organisational systems that determine exposures in the workplace that ultimately lead to incidents:

Atmosphere ® Systems ® Exposure ® Targets

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e.g. vision, values, common goals

e.g. training, purchasing policy, hazard policies and procedures, maintenance procedures, information systems

e.g. state of equipment, conditions in the workplace, behaviour

e.g. incidents, near-misses, lost time injuries

Figure 2. The ASET process (Blewett & Shaw, 1995)

Attention to upstream systemic and cultural failures is likely to lead to sustained improvement in exposure and therefore incidents.

Other researchers have identified unintended consequences from poorly executed cultural change programs. For example an attempt to increase workers’ responsibility for work health and safety led to “worker alienation, shame with regard to injuries, complacency, and fear of bureaucratic processes” in a high-tech workplace. The authors concluded, “some efforts to create safety culture in the workplace may unintentionally undermine the goal of manufacturing safety” (Edwards & Jabs, 2009). Similarly, in investigating a crisis in the nuclear industry, the cultural construct of “staff motivation to be involved in improvement activities” was found to be central to managing work health and safety (Mengolini & Debarberis, 2010). The significant challenges confronted by the competing demands of production and safety have also been identified as a barrier to an organisational culture in which work health and safety is well managed. These were identified in Digging Deeper, as well as in other studies (Walker, 2010).

STRATEGIC POLICY IMPLICATIONS FOR THE AUSTRALIAN STRATEGY So what might be the implications of organisational culture to the Australian Strategy for work health and safety? The following thoughts and observations are offered as an attempt to stimulate a fresh examination of ‘safety culture/climate’ and how this construct might contribute to or detract from improvements in work health and safety in Australia.

1. The idea of ‘safety culture/climate’ arguably alienates work health and safety from key organisational decision-making by painting it as something for specialist activity rather than as a key area of management’s strategic decision-making. In this way, safety culture/climate may be work health and safety’s own worst enemy. If there is to be a focus on culture in organisations, then examining ‘organisational culture’ more broadly and holistically could be an effective means of improving work health and safety. Adopting the language of ‘organisational culture’ would be a step in the right direction. This approach may provide the opportunity to question more broadly the place that work health and safety fits with other aspects of organisational operation, such as production, finance, quality and environmental management, leading to work health and safety improvement strategies.

2. The literature suggests the instrumental approach to safety culture is flawed in practice and the concept of ‘managing culture’ may also be flawed. The muddied concepts of ‘safety culture’ and ‘safety climate’ as tools for fixing organisations may be a barrier to improved work health and safety. Arguably, too much emphasis and research effort has been placed on an instrumental view of safety culture/climate as means of improving work health and safety. This has encouraged and contributed to the commodification of the concept as the latest trend in organisational improvement. The risk of large-scale goal displacement away from the control of risks at source to more ephemeral effort is real.

3. The conflation of the construct of safety culture/climate with behavioural change is a key barrier to healthy and safe working environments and has given behaviour-based safety a foothold in the Australian work health and safety environment. The only way to

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make a workplace healthy and safe is to take the action necessary to make it healthy and safe; there is no substitute for action. Indeed, our regulatory framework supports this view with the over-arching obligation by duty holders to provide safe workplaces and safe systems of work. While the behaviour of individuals is part of the causation of incidents it is by no means the only part, nor is it necessarily the major part. And it is not only the behaviour of those lowest in the hierarchy (and most often with the greatest exposure to risk) that makes its contribution. The strategic decision-making by management is frequently given a diminished role in the behaviour-based safety approach, but may have the greatest impact on work health and safety. The literature suggests that behaviourist approaches to work health and safety employ a limited view of human motivation and may have limited capacity to improve organisational culture.

4. Despite the uncertainty in the literature about ‘safety culture/climate’ as a construct, it is regarded as critical to achieving high standards of work health and safety performance. There is a considerable literature derived from multi-method research identifying the features of organisational culture associated with work health and safety excellence and providing guidance on strategies to create such organisational culture as discussed above. Australian research is relevant to this country’s experience and strategic direction. Empirical data from Australia and internationally indicate there are key dimensions that can be identified in organisational cultures supporting and enhancing healthy and safe working environments. Evidence of this nature can be the foundation for strategies for regulators and policy makers aiming to influence improvements in work health and safety at organisation and industry levels.

5. Contemporary research on the place work health and safety plays in organisational culture is dominated by the instrumental view of culture and investigations that are most often conducted through culture surveys. There is a role for multi-method research that can provide a holistic view of organisations; research best undertaken by researchers with competence in areas such as organisational anthropology, social psychology, sociology and related disciplines. This could lead to a strategic improvement in the research to fill gaps in the emerging areas of: work health and safety and organisational culture and innovation, power and influence, leadership, organisational change, and organisations as societies or communities of practice.

6. There is a community of work health and safety consultants working to assist organisations in Australia. Some have significant expertise and make important discoveries during the course of their work in organisations. At the same time there is a dearth of intervention research nationally and internationally; research that potentially can provide important insights into what works and doesn’t work in organisations. It is not only researchers who have the capacity to be analytical about their experiences and findings. There is a strategically valuable opportunity to capture the applied knowledge and experience of worthy consultants and place it in the peer-reviewed literature for wider examination and dissemination. At present, commercial confidentiality aside, the opportunity cost of writing for academic journals is prohibitive for most consultants, but if this is not encouraged, their work is effectively lost to the community.

7. Much of the literature and research effort on safety culture has focused on traditional organisations with stable workforces. Given changes in the Australian economy and labour market, research needs to include non-traditional organisations that rely on outsourcing, contracting, contingent workforces and other non-traditional work practices.

CONCLUSION

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The construct of safety culture/climate has gained a large following in the literature and in industry. The construct is open for criticism and literature is beginning to emerge that sees the flaws in the construct, its commodification, and its instrumental application in industry. There are important warnings for those who are concerned about the future of work health and safety in Australia.

The Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy by Safe Work Australia is an important opportunity. A strategy that encourages a broad examination of organisational culture and the part work health and safety plays in it will necessarily encourage reflective, holistic, multi-method approaches to the assessment of organisations and their cultures. Instead of relying on surveys to provide all the evidence of cultural performance they would be just one tool in the box of organisational evaluation tools. Using a holistic approach, simple explicit behaviours would no longer be the prime focus of organisational culture evaluation but would be viewed in the context of the political and structural elements of the organisation, taking into account the differentials in power, influence and risk. Linear prescriptions for organisational change would lose their attraction and organisations would embrace uncertainty and the potential for innovation. Such a strategy would also encourage participative approaches for the development of interventions, rather than the application of off-the-shelf solutions, including behaviourist approaches. We are at a point where clever management of work health and safety in the context of organisational culture could make a significant difference to Australian workplaces and the lives of working women and men. It is a time to strategically consider “managing culturally” rather than “managing culture”.

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