The Role of Safety Culture in Preventing Commercial Motor Vehicle Crashes (2007) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 6-15
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From page 6... ...
Overview This discussion of literature focuses on the following concepts: • Organizational culture, • Safety in industrial and transportation settings, • Definition of safety culture, and • Relationship between the safety culture and the trucking and motorcoach industries. Within the motor carrier discussion is an analysis of how individual parts of such organizations, including leadership, safety managers, and drivers, create and interact with an organization's safety culture.
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7Using the term "accident," however, is thought by some to be inappropriate when describing failures in safety. Such a term places the responsibility for safety, risk, and loss on someone or something other than those employees and other persons directly involved in unsafe behavior (Van Fleet 2000)
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It should also be noted that the Mearns research suggests that the reason behind unsafe behavior is "perceptions of pressure for production." Thus, the goals of production and profit do not align with those of safety. Safety and Scale of Loss The literature on safety and loss tends to focus on single industrial disasters of great magnitude, such as Bhopal (Union Carbide chemical disaster)
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hazardous environments exist internally (e.g., chemical plant) and externally (e.g., transportation-related industries)
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The INSAG-4 continues its definition of the term, stating that safety culture flows from top to bottom, with senior management being essential to an organization's safety culture, and official policies and objectives regarding safety being a critical indicator of an organization's safety culture. The report also offers an outline of how one should determine if a safety culture exists in the operation of nuclear power plants, with the criteria for judgment relating to the following (all of which can be related to and used by motor carriers)
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Relevant examples of such tasks may involve those who operate hazmat tank truck versus those who haul general freight. Likewise, those who drive trucks as a profession may have a different safety culture than those who manage truck drivers.
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learning its culture. Likewise, an organization must have a culture in place to teach new members its norms, attitudes, values, and beliefs.
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Developing a Culture of Safety within a Motor Carrier Pidgeon (1997) , in concluding that the cultures of organizations are often blind to emerging/new threats to safety and that there is a need to mitigate this "blindness," states that While safety and culture do seem to hold an intimate relationship, the later should be invoked only as one part of a wider critique of organizational politics and performance: the only thing for certain, then, about a safety culture is that one can never assume we have a good one in every respect.
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Communicating a Safety Culture Distinct groups within organizations, such as drivers and their managers, may have high levels of conflict with one another because communications are either not effective or non-existent (Schein, p.
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safety rewards or incentives as part of their employment (Bergoffen)
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