| In light of the significant social and economic costs associated with workplace accidents, many companies have tried to implement comprehensive safety programs in hopes of achieving superior safety performance. Yet not all companies that have implemented state-of-the-art safety programs have achieved the same high safety performance. There is a large variation among companies. The question that emerges is: why is safety performance not as good as one would expect from a company that seems to have implemented a good safety program with all the key elements?;The present study was undertaken to explore this interesting phenomenon in the context of a large nation-wide construction company. This company encountered the same problem described above. One of its offices was believed to have implemented comprehensive safety programs, but did not achieve the expected high safety performance. The purpose of this study therefore was to investigate how and why, or why not, safety culture influenced safety performance in the organization being studied.;A case study approach was used because it is particularly well-suited for examining complex phenomena in their contexts and for retaining the holistic and meaningful characteristics of the phenomena. Multiple sources of data were collected, including a qualitative assessment of safety culture through critical interviews and observations and a quantitative assessment of safety culture through a safety climate survey.;This study concluded that safety culture played a mediating role in affecting the effectiveness of safety programs and, therefore, had an impact on safety performance. The study also found a relatively high correlation between the qualitative assessment and the quantitative assessment of safety culture. The most critical finding was the recognition that the organization being studied still operated in a "human error" mode of safety culture in which accidents were believed to be caused largely by human behaviors and that the organization had not evolved into taking a broader social organizational view of safety. This key finding was believed to have profound implications for the safety practice of the organization. |
