Safety Culture, Corporate Culture

Organizational Transformation and the Commitment to Safety

Heather Hpfl
Bolton Business School, Bolton Institute, UK
Introduction The past decade-and-a-half has been a period of considerable and rapid change. It has been a period in which many organizations have decided to address the need for change via the transformation of organizational culture. What this means in practice is problematic. This article examines the implications of organizational culture change for the ways in which safety issues are perceived, formulated and addressed. The last ten years has seen a proliferation of literature on the subject of organizational culture. Much of the writing within the management perspective has regarded organizational culture as a variable to be manipulated (see Smircichs critical paper[1] and managed to strategic ends[2-7] This view of organizational culture as a variable carries with it the implication that culture can be controlled, that beliefs and values can be moulded and that behaviour can be changed in order to be perceived more favourably by customers. Hence, culture change has been viewed as a means of improving corporate performance by securing greater employee commitment and identification with corporate values. According to Willmott[8], theorists have either regarded culture in this way, as a critical variable to be manipulated to improve performance, or as a root metaphor to describe and explain social phenomena in organizations. Organizational Culture Generally speaking, there has been an absence of critical analysis in the management literature. Scheins cultural model is a case in point. This has been particularly influential in offering both a definition of culture and suggestions for a diagnostic approach to the study of organizational culture[9,10]. Schein defines culture as the basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of an organization[10, p. 8], a definition which in various
The author acknowledges the contribution of Moira Jennings, Research Assistant, School of Civil Engineering, Bolton Institute, for her help with formatting the article and chasing incomplete references. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Second International Conference on Emergency Planning and Disaster Management, Lancaster (UK), July 11-14, 1993.

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Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 3 No. 3, 1994, pp. 49-58. MCB University Press, 0965-3562

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formulations appears in innumerable accounts and studies of organizational culture. Bate[11] argues that a key feature of culture is that it is shared it refers to ideas, meanings and values people hold in common. Sathe[6, p. 11]) contends that, People feel a sense of commitment to an organizations objectives when they identify with those objectives and experience some emotional attachment to them. The shared beliefs and values that compose culture help generate such identification and attachment. The notion of shared beliefs and values is regarded as unproblematic. This article seeks to examine the implications of the assumption of shared meaning for safety and to give attention to the related problem of the management of meaning[1,12]. Whether regarded as a root metaphor, a functional variable or as an instrument of increased management control, the study of culture and corporate values clearly has important implications for the study of safety. In order to examine these implications it is necessary to provide evidence of the instability of the theoretical notion of cultural consensus and the simplistic assumption of culture as a manageable variable. Linstead and Grafton Small[13] argue that corporate culture is the term used for a culture devised by management and transmitted, marketed, sold or imposed on the rest of the organisation, that it has an internal and external image and that it includes actions and belief the rites, rituals, stories, values which are offered to organizational members as part of the seductive process of achieving membership and gaining commitment. This definition of corporate culture provides a valuable starting point because it is rooted in managerial assumptions regarding entitlement to manipulate the social aspects of work or as Willmott[8] puts it, by enabling employees to derive a sense of meaning and purpose from using their discretion to put corporate values into practice ... nonrational aspects of organization ... can be colonised by management. This latter point has considerable implications for safety and for the way in which nonrational or irrational aspects of systems come to be regarded. If in the pursuit of corporate consensus, organizations seek to colonize the non-rational, corporate culture functions to conceal discrepancies and to gloss over the dysfunctional. Where culture is regarded as capable of manipulation, commitment to the organization is assumed to be increased as the individuals sense of identity is brought into line with the values of the corporate culture. This in turn produces a standardized pattern of behaviours which characterize the company and which, in effect, become the basis of a corporate performance. As organizations become increasingly concerned with regularly pursued patterns of behaviour to support a notion of service and quality, the performance aspect of corporate culture becomes increasingly problematic. An extreme example of this is provided by Disneyland in Van Maanen[14, p. 58-76]. The Disneyland site is divided into three areas back-stage, on-stage and staging, behaviour may differ considerably between the different arenas of action. Moreover, and with direct relevance to safety, within the performance of the role, Van Maanen[14, pp. 71-2] identifies a range of strategies adopted by ride operators to punish

guests who fail to play out their roles according to the script. Members of the public who fail to play their part are dealt with by a whole range of illicit behaviours which are concealed by the smiling courtesy of Disneyland role performance. These include guests being accidentally hit in the face by seat belts, violent braking causing guests to fly forward from their seats, being drenched, and having their hands trapped. Disneyland is a well regulated corporate culture with comprehensive manuals to govern behaviour and interaction. The strength of the corporate culture is matched by the strength of resistance to it and the complex web of informal ways of deviating from the manual. There are direct parallels to this in safety management. Rigorous and bureaucratic approaches to safety may produce high standards of performance in terms of that which is presented and measurable or observable. The day-today practice may be completely different, that is, attention may be paid to producing the appearance while, or even at the expense of, neglecting day-today practice. Caesar, in a controversial paper presented to the Flight Safety Foundation Air Safety Seminar in Los Angeles 1992[15], commented that the passenger crawling away from the wreckage of a burnt-out aircraft is unlikely to comment on the quality of the caviar or the temperature of the wine. This provocative statement exposes a complex set of issues which arise from the articulation between corporate culture as performance and the safety issues which can be obscured by appearances. Clearly, an understanding of the wider implications of corporate culture change requires a critical awareness of corporate culture as a privileged or official standpoint and an appreciation of the need to give attention to what is concealed by its construction. Corporate Culture Change and Safety Management As well as being a period of rapid organizational change, the past decade has been characterized by a series of major disasters affecting such diverse technologies as nuclear installations, chemical plants, oil tankers and ferries, railway networks, oil platforms and, of course, commercial and military aircraft. Despite the obvious differences in the industries involved and their technologies, it has become apparent from the analysis of such disasters that, at a contextual level, there are many common characteristics[16]. As a result, considerable attention has been paid to the complexity of the contributory causes in accident analysis, to the multiplicity of ways in which systems can fail, to the predominance of human factor contributions to failure, to perceptual and information difficulties and, not least, to the appreciation of the historical dimension, the fact that disasters often have a long incubation period. This widening of the boundary around safety issues has resulted in a move away from what Toft has described as a propensity to look for simple causal solutionsshaped by the technical concerns of the engineering community[17] towards a commitment to the recognition of the social and organizational context of incidents and accidents. In this article, the concern is to examine the extent to which the manipulation of corporate culture reduces safety issues to a

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declared rhetoric supported by artifacts of a safety culture which may, in turn, reduce a concern for safety to a cosmetic exercise. In such circumstances, the problem of safety becomes a matter of having appropriate methods, manuals and messages. Safety becomes critical to the extent that what is unsafe is concealed by the pursuit of coherent rhetoric and the apparent security of quantification. A number of theorists have wrestled with these aspects of safety. Reason, among others, points to the significance of the latent failures[16, p. 28] which only become evident when they occur with a precipitating event[18] which causes the system to fail. Moreover, Reason contends that there is a growing awareness ... that attempts to discover and remedy these latent failures will achieve greater safety benefits than will localized efforts to minimize active failures[16, p. 476-7], for example, in the nuclear industry, failure to perform necessary maintenance activities, i.e. latent failure, has played a major role in incidents and accidents in nuclear installations[19]. Consequently, Reason argues that safety specialists need to direct their attention to the identification and neutralization of latent failures, rather than attempting to prevent active or front line failures. Yet, it is generally to the identifiable aspects of safety that most attention is paid. In the face of major accidents and disasters, many organizations have become concerned to demonstrate a visible commitment to safety. Unfortunately, this may lead to a well intentioned commitment to the visible aspects of safety at the cost of what is not immediate and apparent. In his now classic study of disasters, Turner[18] argued that large-scale accidents have an incubation period in which there are a series of unnoticed events which are likely to run counter to established beliefs about the way that the system operates or that risks are defined. Turner encouraged safety researchers to concern themselves with the cultural disruption which is produced when anticipated patterns of information fail to materialize in order to develop an appreciation of the way in which individuals gradually come to develop and rely on a mistaken view of the world[18, p. 193]. The problem of understanding the origins of disaster is the problem of understanding and accounting for harmful discharges of energy which occur in ways unanticipated by those pursuing orderly goals[18, p. 201]. The organic culture of the workplace produces its own taken-for-granted assumptions about the world and systems of ordering experience. The dangers are well documented in accident literature. However, organizational culture change provides a further level of complexity. Corporate culture with its emphasis on shared beliefs, values, norms and style seeks to construct common meanings for experience. The mechanisms of corporate culture change reinforce a common rhetoric by ensuring the coherence of systems, structures, skills and rewards as a basis for regulating and standardizing patterns of behaviour. This coherent and orderly world increasingly comes to believe in its own constructions[20, 21]. This becomes part of the problem, that is, the orderly

world believes its own messages regarding the efficacy of its safety structures and procedures. For Turner, this period of order ends when some precipitating event draws attention to the discrepancy between the environment as it is believed to be and the environment as it actually is. This forces into the open the hidden, ambiguous or anomalous events which have accumulated during the incubation period[18, p. 201] producing a sudden shift in information levels. By seeking to create and manage meaning for employees, organizations aim to produce a uniformity of standards, service and quality. There are two problems with this. First, the pursuit of coherence imposes the appearance of order on a wide range of behaviours and experiences including the discrepant and irrational. Thus, multiple meanings are likely to be glossed over by a privileged interpretation of events. The apparently purposive nature of organizations supports the validity of this interpretation and provides rewards for consensus. The power to manage meanings is intrinsic to this process of order and giving orders as is the framing of corporate values. However, the rewards a company can offer, while they undoubtedly attach meaning to behaviour and experience, are in themselves insufficient to sustain meaning. Contradictions are concealed by appearance, that is to say, members of organizations play the roles that are required of them with varying degrees of skill while personal attitudes and values may be temporarily eclipsed by such performances. Organizations seek to create and re-create themselves to achieve a presentation and re-presentation of that appearance. The meaning which is offered as part of the corporate definition of reality, located as it is in an instrumental approach to the present, is inherently conflictual but seductive. These conflicts are not normally exposed until some dislocation of expectation occurs. The individual in the organization is required to play a role in a specific context or range of contexts. As such, he/she does not require cultural consensus[22, p. 58] about the meanings on which their actions are based. What this means is that consensus regarding the frame of action, the performance, becomes more important than shared meanings about the nature of the action. A smooth reading through the script becomes more important than interpretative improvisation. In safety terms, it leads to situations where an airline stewardess will tell a passenger, Im sure the captain knows what hes doing when the passenger provides information which is contrary to the script. Clearly, this is always true of the norms of any social situation. The point here is that corporate culture change seeks to reinforce corporate norms and in doing so may foreclose on some of the wider interpretations of an event with detrimental consequences for safety. A second problem area concerns the imposition of apparently consensual values. This will result in dissonant behaviour and experience in organizational members who may demonstrate their resistance to the organization in a range of unpredictable ways, for example, as in the Disneyland case[14] or that of airline cabin crew, who in recent years have undergone intensive customer

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service training programmes, and have developed a range of behavioural strategies to resist the roles that have been laid on them. Whether from a theoretical standpoint or as the basis of managerial action, what needs to be challenged is the nave preoccupation with shared values as a route to organizational success[13, p. 332]. Corporate culture has been viewed as an organizational variable to be manipulated in order to: q increase commitment; q achieve standardized patterns of behaviours and style; q pursue quality and service; q improve performance; q change customer/competitor perceptions; and q increase identification with the organization. However, in relation to safety, the following factors may implicitly apply to corporate culture: q Corporate culture seeks to order the non-rational aspects of behaviour. q Behavioural regularity conceals dysfunctional aspects. q Performance can equate with appearance. q Local practice may be very different from espoused cultural values and norms. q Culture may even induce resistance, deviance. q Culture may become the province of rehearsed rhetoric as opposed to practice. q Safety may become synonymous with safety artefacts manuals, audits, quantifications and procedures. Multiple meanings, irrational aspects of systems and issues of information for which there are no appropriate categories are important issues to be borne in mind. Sometimes it is the case that there is no appropriate channel for the specific or discrepant piece of information to enter the system either because the particular problem is not officially recognized as a hazard or because the existing construction of the situation does not permit the new information to disconcert perceptions. By reinforcing a particular style of desired behaviour, organizations exacerbate this problem so that an organization may confine itself to specific ways of perceiving its task, to bounded decision zones[18, p.200]. The problem for safety management is that it is what is left outside of this bounded rationality which is likely to be far more hazardous than those aspects of the system which have been anticipated. Safety Culture Development There is a problem in the relationship between the concept of an organizational culture and that of a safety culture. A safety culture cannot be set aside from the

Safety rhetoric and vulnerability Development of safety rhetoric Consensual world view of safety practice Exclusion of the non-rational Glossing of discrepant information Pursuit of "cosmetic" appearance of safety Partial control of information = Delusion of control of behaviour/nature Power to construct alternative perspectives as deviant Paradox of vulnerability

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Figure 1. Safety Culture Development; Safety Rhetoric and Vulnerability

organizational context in which it resides. A safety culture implies some level of relationship between the corporate culture of an organization and the culture of the workplace. There are many reasons why these two cultures differ. The intention here is not to discredit the notion of a safety culture but, rather, to put forward the notion of a safety culture as an interpretative device which mediates between the espoused values of the corporate culture, that is its declared and desired common values, and the taken-for-granted assumptions of the workplace culture (see Figure 1). A safety culture is not merely a set of assumptions, shared values, behavioural routines and supporting documentation. A safety culture must be capable of mediating between best practice, norms of conduct and good order and, at the same time, create an environment which is receptive to multiple sources of information, one which protects itself from its own delusions and which problematizes learning. Behind the Assumptions of Safety Management Recent work by Turner[23] has focused on ways in which organizational learning can be used in safety management and has drawn attention to the importance of getting behind appearances in order to gain access to organizational processes. In this respect, he argues that new organizational learning requires an appreciation of the processes and multiple perceptions of which organizations are made up; that organizations are like mysteries which have to be unravelled; that the learning cycle is complicated by ambiguities, corruptions of meaning, multiple meanings, symbols and so on; that the assumption of rationality needs to be bracketed: that records and computerized systems need to be regarded as problematic; that assumptions of completeness

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need to be challenged; that interpretative methods need to be used to get behind taken for granted assumptions. This approach to safety inevitably meets resistance. In part, this is because it represents a philosophical commitment to a style of safety management which cannot be quantified nor directly applied at an operational level. The issues which it seeks to keep in play do not yield to analysis or lend themselves to data capture. Safety is viewed as something which cannot be reduced to simple formulations or quantifications. The need to present safety management as an entirely rational activity precludes an appreciation of the irrational aspects of safety which theorists such as Toft[17], Turner[18,23] and Waring[24] have done so much to advance. However, some organizations have given attention to the importance of an interpretative environment for safety. Safety services in British Airways provides a notable example of a philosophical approach to safety which has involved a commitment to the principles of organizational learning. The department seeks to stimulate reciprocity between information which is comparatively straightforward to acquire and that which is not[25]. This implies developing a sensitivity and responsiveness within the system to the complex, irrational, embedded, conflictual aspects of information which may be permitted to emerge by a commitment to organizational learning and the acquisition of a dynamic memory. Summary This article has sought to give attention to the relationship between corporate culture and safety culture. The purpose has been to regard the relationship as problematic and to consider the implications for the way in which safety issues are addressed. In essence, the article contrasts corporate culture which seeks to promote shared values, norms, styles and regularity pursued patterns of behaviour with safety cultures which need to get behind appearances, taken-for-granted assumptions and norms in order to remain receptive to the irrational aspects of systems. Where corporate cultures appropriate safety as a strategic variable without attention to these underlying issues, the result can at best be cosmetic.
References 1. Smircich, L. and Morgan, G., Leadership: The Management of Meaning, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, Vol. 18 No. 3, 1982, pp. 257-73. 2. Deal, T. and Kennedy, A., Corporate Cultures; The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1982. 3. Goldsmith, W. and Clutterbuck, D., The Winning Streak , Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1984. 4. Lorsch, J.W., Managing Culture: The Invisible Barrier to Strategic Change, in Kilmann, R.H., Saxton, M.J. and Serpa, R. (Eds), Gaining Control of the Corporate Culture, JosseyBass, San Francisco, CA, 1985. 5. Peters, T.J. and Waterman, R.H., In Search of Excellence, Harper & Row, New York, NY, 1982.

6. Sathe, V., Implications of Corporate Culture: A Managers Guide to Action, Organizational Dynamics, Autumn 1983. 7. Waterman, R.H., The Renewal Factor, Bantam Books, New York, NY, 1988. 8. Willmott, H., Strength is Ignorance; Slavery is Freedom: Managing Culture in Modern Organizations, a paper presented at the SCOS Conference, Copenhagen, June 1991. 9. Schein, E.H., Coming to a New Awareness of Organizational Culture, Sloan Management Review, Winter 1984. 10. Schein, E.H., Organizational Culture and Leadership: A Dynamic View, Jossey Bass, San Francisco, CA, 1985. 11. Bate, P., The Impact of Organizational Culture on Approaches to Organizational Problem Solving, Organization Studies, Vol. 5 No. 1, 1984, pp. 43-66. 12. Smith, P.B. and Peterson, M.F., Leadership, Organizations and Culture, Sage, London, 1988. 13. Linstead, S.L. and Grafton Small, R., On Reading Organizational Culture, Organization Studies, Vol. 13 No. 3, 1992, pp. 331-55. 14. Van Maanen, J., The Smile Factory: Work at Disneyland, in Frost, P.J., Moore, L.F., ReisLouis, M., Londberg, C.C. and Martin, J. (Eds), Reframing Organizational Culture, Sage, Newbury Park, CA, 1991. 15. Caesar, H., Living with the Five Million-year-old Computer, proceedings of the 45th International Air Safety Seminar (IASS), Los Angeles, CA, 1992. 16. Reason, J., The Contribution of Latent Human Failures to the Breakdown of Complex Systems, in Broadbent, D.E., Reasons, J. and Baddeley, A. (Eds), Human Factors in Hazardous Situations, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990. 17. Toft, B., Changing a Safety Culture Decree, Prescription or Learning?, a paper presented at the IRS Risk Management and Safety Culture Seminar, London Business School, April 1992. 18. Turner, B.A., Man-Made Disasters, Wykeham Publications, London, 1978. 19. Rasmussen, J., What Can Be Learned From Human Error Reports, in Duncan, K., Gruneberg, M. and Wallis, D. (Eds), Changes in Working Life, Wiley, London, 1980. 20. Schwartz, H., The Challenger Disaster: The End of the American Dream, a paper presented to the SCOS Conference, Copenhagen, 1991. 21. Janis, I.L., Victims of Groupthink, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA, 1972. 22. Fernandez, J.W., Persuasions and Performances, The Play of Tropes in Culture, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IA, 1986. 23. Turner, B.A., How Can We Design a Safe Organization?, the Second International Conference on Industrial and Organizational Crisis Management, New York, NY, November 1989. 24. Waring, A., Success with Safety Management Systems, The Safety & Health Practitioner, September 1991, pp. 20-3. 25. MacGregor, C. and Hpfl, H., A Commitment to Change: Safety Management in British Airways, Disaster Prevention and Management, Vol. 2 No. 2, 1993, pp. 6-13. Further Reading Ackroyd, S. and Crowdy, P., Can Culture Be Managed? Working with Raw Material: The Case of the English Slaughtermen, Personnel Review, Vol. 19 No. 5, 1989, pp. 3-13. Anthony, P.D., The Paradox of the Management of Culture or He Who Leads is Lost, Personnel Review, Vol. 19 No. 4, 1989, pp. 3-8. Bruce, M., Managing People First Bringing the Service Concept into British Airways, Industrial and Commercial Training, March/April 1987.

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Caesar, H., Air Transport Development and the Role of Aviation Administration, Proceedings of the 43rd International Air Safety Seminar (IASS), Rome, 1990. Christensen, S. and Kreiner, K., On the Origin of Organizational Cultures, a paper presented to the SCOS Conference, Lund, June 1984. Holtom, M., The Basis for Safety Management, Focus, November 1991. Johnson, G., Strategic Change and the Management Process, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1987. Kirkbride P.S., Personnel Management and Organizational Culture: A Case of Deviant Innovation?, Personnel Review, Vol. 16 No. 1, 1987, pp. 3-9. Martin, J. and Meyerson, D., Organizational Cultures and the Denial, Channelling and Acknowledgement of Ambiguity, in Pondy, L.R., Boland, R.J. and Thomas, H. (Eds), Managing Ambiguity and Change, Wiley, 1988. Pascale, R., The Paradox of Corporate Culture: Reconciling Ourselves to Socialization, California Management Review, Vol. XXVII No. 2, 1985, pp. 26-41. Ray, C.A., Corporate Culture: The Last Frontier of Control, Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 23 No. 3, 1986, pp. 287-97. Reason, J., The Chernobyl Errors, Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, Vol. 40, 1987, pp. 201-6. Seaman, C., The British Airways Safety Information System, a presentation to the 44th IASS, Singapore, November 1991. Smircich, L., Concepts of Culture and Organizational Analysis, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 28, 1983, pp. 339-58. Thomas, M., In Search of Culture: Holy Grail or Gravy Train?, Personnel Management , September 1985. Toft, B. and Turner, B.A., The Schematic Report Analysis Diagram: A Simple Aid to Learning From Large-scale Failures, International CIS Journal: Command and Control, Communication and Information Systems, Vol. l No. 2, April/May 1987.