Investigating employee perceptions of a framework of safety culture maturity

A framework for the development of organisational safety culture based on Westrum's [Westrum, R., 1996. Human factors experts beginning to focus on organizational factors in safety. ICAO Journal October] typology of organisational communication had been formulated in a previous interview study. The framework had face validity based on the judgment of oil industry employees of five levels of safety culture maturity, and how their work experience translated into the framework. In order to assess whether the content of the framework was internally consistent in terms of the levels of safety culture, a further study was carried out. The detailed descriptions generated in the previous study were "unpicked" into their constituent statements and used in a safety culture questionnaire in order to investigate whether the statements formed statistically coherent and distinct groups relating to the levels of maturity. The questionnaire responses were submitted to principal components analysis (PCA). The component structures obtained were used to interpret the workforce's perception of the organisational safety culture in terms of the framework. Scales were constructed from the items that loaded on the components and were tested for reliability. Overall, this study provided some support for the safety culture maturity framework. The component structures provided partial support for the distinctions between the five levels of safety culture maturity and the internal consistency of the descriptions of the levels was generally supported by the analysis of the data. Participants perceived desirable features of safety culture to be associated with each other, and perceived undesirable aspects to group together in the same way. The framework of safety culture maturity requires further research attention to ensure its appropriateness and sound theoretical basis.