Safety Climate Culture Defined

Although climate is difficult to define, it is easy to see and feel. According to 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 [3,4]. 

Safety climate reflects if safety is perceived by all employees to be a key value in the organization. The terms climate and culture are both used here [3,4]. The question is has a safety climate (culture) been created that is conducive to adopting safe work attitudes and habits [3,4]  

The concept of culture became a very popular management subject in the early 1980s, because of the popularity of a book written by Peters and Waterman, In Search of Excellence. That book described what it was that accounted for the economic success of a number of companies. Other books followed, delving into the concept [3,4]. 

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 [3,4]. 

Likert not only researched climate he also defined it as being excellent in ten areas  

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Organizations vary considerably in terms of how they manage safety. Thus, the expectations of management safety behavior formed from one workplace may have little basis in reality in another workplace. At this point, it is also worth noting the vast literature on safety culture and safety climate. Safety culture stems from the organization and is the top-down safety values, beliefs, and norms, while safety climate is more accurately defined as the employee s perceptions of how various aspects of the working environment impact on their safety (see Bjerkan 2010, for a... 

Safety culture (and/or climate) measures may themselves be regarded as proxy measures of safety in the sense outlined above. However, few studies have found these measures to be strongly related to hard risk outcomes such as injuries and accidents (Guldemnund 2000 The Health Foundation 2011). There are several reasons for this apparent lack of correlation. Safety climate or culture is, by definition, shared within a social unit (a work group), but such units are usually ill defined and small. Safety climate or culmre is multi-faceted, and each facet is a constract, as described in the previous sections of this chapter, based on a few items from a questionnaire. Although the reliability and the intra-class correlation for the constructs can be acceptable, repeated measurements are typically infeasible, and when the questionnaire has been applied repeatedly, its responsiveness (the ability of the constract to reliable measure changes over time (de Vet et al. 2011)) is usually not reported but can be expected to be low. At the same time, since... 

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. 

The leader s role is to define the healthcare safety issue for the organization and the terms of the organization s engagement with it. The leader marshals the constituencies that must cooperate to create a strong safety climate and an organizational culture that supports safety. In subsequent chapters we address how this is done well, what it is made up of, and how such efforts are measured. 

What are the characteristics of your organization s culture that most support safety Where are its challenges What messages about your priorities define your current safety climate ... 

We can define the attributes of a healthy organizational culture and safety climate and specify how to measure them (to be discussed in chapter 3). 

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 ... 

From working with one organization after another, we now know that both culture and climate can be defined and measured concretely. We also know that although culture (the way we do things around here, rigorously observed) and climate (what gets noticed and recognized most immediately and prominently) are both important to safety, it is leadership that creates them. 

To appreciate the profound importance of culture and climate to the safety of the working interface, consider that medical errors most frequently occur in situations in which providers must deviate from procedure or in which procedures are weakly defined or nonexistent. It is in these situations that culture comes most strongly into play to define how well things are done. Think, for example, of the story from chapter 1 about the loss of life resulting from two open containers of unidentified fluids in the operating room. The culture apparently (again, we are speculating in order to make a point) did... 

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