Conceptual Frameworks for Safety Culture and its Manifestation in Organisations

Safety and organisational safety culture play an ever-increasing role for social and business organisations. While the use of the different safety management systems is more and more inevitable and becoming an integral part of organisational processes, researching the human factor is of key importance in the different interpretations of safety culture. Recent research on culture has identified a number of factors that affect organisational behaviour, however, little is known about personal values, competences, attitudes and other implicit factors that make people capable of effectively managing safety processes in an organisation. Creating safety at the workplace, raising awareness of prevention, perception of risk factors, minimisation of risks, non-stop “alertness” and appropriate communication, in other words safety awareness and the ability to cope with crisis situations may be defining elements of organisational safety culture.