Commitment to safety in the manufacturing industry

This article describes one element of a large-scale research of safety culture at 13 industrial firms in the United Kingdom. The research is based on data from three areas of measurement that are important to describing safety culture: workplace evaluations, a survey of employee attitudes toward safety (including questionnaire and interview data), and business accident records. Employee attitudes toward safety as indicated in a self-administered questionnaire were used to predict perceived commitment to safety in this study. The strength of the organization's safety culture was measured by commitment to safety. Employee attitudes toward safety may be predicted based on three factors: management activities for safety, the quality of safety training, and their own personal actions for safety, according to the research. Their views toward safety management activities had the greatest correlation with their commitment to safety. These views were also predictive of the quality of safety instruction and personal safety actions. Surprisingly, the latter were unrelated to assessments of safety commitment.