Research organisational climate

CSIRO (Common Wealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation). Climate Change and the Risk to Water Supply. CSIRO press release 06/191. CSIRO, Clayton, S. Victoria, Australia, 2006. 

Environmental sustainability is a pressing problem at the current time due to issues such as climate change, pollution and disturbances associated with biodiversity. A wide variety of organisations, such as governments, universities and industry, are working at the forefront of scientific and technological research to find solutions to these problems. 

For most of my career I have worked in Edinburgh, first at the University s Centre for Speech Technology Research (CSTR) and laterly at Rhetorical Systems. The book reflects the climate in both those organisations which, to my mind, had a healthy balance between eclectic knowledge... 

Defining what we mean by safety culture has taken up many of the pages of scientific articles and books in the last few decades. A recent round table involving experts, organised by the Healthcare Foundation in Mareh 2013, touched upon one of the thornier issues which was raised by a number of these articles, namely the culture vs climate debate (e.g. Schein 1984 Meams and Flin 1999). The definitions provided by the round table (Healthcare Foundation 2013 3) attempted to distinguish between the two, whilst noting that definitions vary within the research literature ... 

Safety and risk management research in healthcare has adopted as its dominant trend the systems oriented approach, modelled largely on previous research in safely critical industries such as aviation and nuclear power. The systems view entails that the focus is not primarily on the mechanisms of individual human error but on the factors that shape human performance (Rasmussen 1986 Reason 1993,1997). In an organisational context, such factors are, of course, those that are within the control of the organisation. For instance, it has been suggested that quahty and safety are affected not only by operators professional and technical competence and skills, but also by their attitudes to and perceptions of their job roles, their organisation and management (Helmreich and Merritt 1998). Such employee attitudes and views are important elements which shape safety cirlture - and its related notion safety climate . Indeed, survey studies have shown that staff attitudes are important indices of safety performance not only in human-machine system domains such as railway operations and constmction (e.g. Itoh and Andersen 1999 Itoh et al. 2004 Silva et al. 2004) but also in healthcare (e.g. Colla et al. 2005 Itoh and Andersen 2010). 

The goals, priorities and activities are manifest in job characteristios -those features of organisational life and work that direcdy affect its members. Therefore, one line of enquiry within safety culture research is how it is affected by job characteristics. We presented evidence to suggest that such a relationship exists within British community pharmacies. In basic terms, safely climate varies according to the levels of psychological and physical demands and the personal and material resources available to meet these demands. 

Zenobia Talati is an Industrial/Organisational Psychology Masters and PhD candidate at the University of Western Australia Through her work as a research assistant, she has developed expertise in the areas of leadership, organisational culture/climate, workplace safely, safety leadership and proactivily. She has also co-authored a chapter on how leaders can improve employee safely behaviours and safety culture in high risk industries. 

A management system promotes safety and defines the route to it. But it is the culture of staff that determines whether or not the route is systematically taken. Methods of measuring an organisation s safety climate or safety culture, based on questionnaires that test the attitudes of members of the organisation, have been developed (e.g. Cooper and Phillips 1994, The Keil Centre 2001). It could be possible to reflect the results of such measurements as levels of risk, and research could be conducted into ways of doing so. This, however, is not within the objectives of this paper and will not be discussed further. 

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