Safety management behaviour concepts

Other key ideas within the cognitive theories that are often employed within social research are those of values, attitudes and beliefs (Baron et a/. 2006). These elements are often seen as the basic criteria of many social phenomena, including the highly complex concept of culture, although it is attitudes, the inherent disposition to respond favourably or unfavourably to an object/person/ event (Aronson et a/. 2007), that are most frequently used, due to their accessibility through tools such as questionnaires or observed behaviours (Ajzen 2005). In construction, safety management often draws on this way of thinking in the use of safety climate surveys. 

The current chapter first presents some definitions of terms such as values , norms , attitudes and beliefs . It then focuses on how these factors relate to behavioural issues in the context and practice of safety management. Ortwin Renn has already discussed societal norms in relation to policy making by government and industry in Chapter 2 in this volume. In addition to the concept of societal norms, this chapter discusses national culture and how it can influence safety culture in the oil and gas industry. Finally, the chapter compares and contrasts the safety culture of the oil and gas industry with that of another industry, air traffic management (ATM), which is considered to be one the safest industries in the world. The possibility of learning lessons from this high-reliability industry are discussed. 

In this chapter we have discussed the rationale for the need for change from a traditional approach to safety management at work to a behaviour-based approach. In the following chapter we discuss in more depth some of the problems involved in using the concepts of attitude and personality as an explanation of behaviour and introduce the notion of risk perception. In Chapter 3 we move on to present the theoretical background to the behavioural approach, before describing its application to safety in Chapter 4. 

With that said we have seen a growing number of scientific studies on safety culture, which aimed to characterize the concept and to define the dimensions that allow the evaluation. In this context, we emphasize the study of Femandez-Muniz, Montes-Peon and V quez-Oidas (2007). This study based on key publications on safety culture and an integrative perspective defined the concept as a set of values, perceptions, attitudes and behavioural patterns related to security and shared by members of an organization. In this conceptualization it is also integrated a set of policies and practices relating to the management of exposure to occupational hazards, implemented at each level of organization procedures. 

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