Assessing safety culture in nuclear power stations$T. Lee*, K. HarrisonEnvironmental Psychology and Policy Research Unit, School of Psychology, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Fife KY16 9JU, UKAbstractDefinitions of safety culture abound, but they variously refer to the safety-related values, attitudes, beliefs, risk perceptions and behaviours of all employees. This assembly may seem too inclusive to be meaningful, but each represents a di?erent level of processing and the choice for measurement (or intervention) is more pragmatic than theoretical. The present study addresses mainly attitudes, but also reported behaviours. This is done using a 120-item questionnaire covering eight domains of safety in three nuclear power stations. Principal components analysis yields 28 factors all but four of which are correlated with one or more of nine criteria of accident history. Di?erences by gender, age, shifts/days and work areas are revealed, but these are confounded by type of job and ANOVAS are applied to clarify the main sources of variation. The e?ects on safety culture of a number of organisational com-ponents are also explored. For example, the role of safety in team briefings, management style, work pressure versus safety, etc. It is concluded that personnel safety surveys can use- fully be applied to deliver a multi-perspective, comprehensive and economical assessment of the current state of a safety culture and also to explore the dynamic inter-relationships of its working parts. # 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.Keywords: Safety culture; Nuclear accidents; Nuclear employees; Nuclear power stations; Safety attitudes1. IntroductionConsiderable progress has been made towards engineering out the physical causes of accidents in high technology plants. It is now generally acknowledged that individual human frailties and pervasive organisational defects lie behind the majority of the remaining accidents. Although many of these have been anticipatedSafety Science 34 (2000) 6197 www.elsevier.com/locate/ssci0925-7535/00/$ - see front matter # 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S0925-7535(00)00007-2$A version of the survey, including the full questionnaire and software for computing factor scoresand norms based on five NPSs will shortly be available on CD. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +44-1334-462063; fax: +44-1334-463042. E-mail address: trlst-andrewsac.uk (T. Lee).in safety rules, prescriptive procedures and management treatises, people dont always do what they are supposed to do. Some employees have negative attitudes to safety which adversely a?ect their behaviours. This undermines the system of mul- tiple defences that an organisation constructs and maintains to guard against injury to its workers and damage to its property. This safety management system is essen- tially a social system, wholly reliant on the employees who operate it. Its success depends on three things; its scope, whether employees are knowledgeable about it and whether they are well disposed towards it, i.e., committed to making it work. The concept of safety culture has evolved as a way of formulating and addressing this new focus. An excellent overview and practical guide has recently been provided by Cooper (1998).The definition of safety culture adopted here is the one proposed by ACSNI (The Advisory Committee on the Safety of Nuclear Installations), i.e.:Thesafetycultureofanorganisation istheproductof individual and groupvalues, attitudes, perceptions, competencies and patterns of behaviour that determine thecommitment to and the style and proficiency of an organisations health and safety management. Organisations with a positive safety culture are characterised by communica- tions founded on mutual trust, by shared perceptions of the importance of safetyand by confidence in the e?cacy of preventive measures. (ACSNI, 1993, p. 23).All definitions that attempt to capture the essence of safety culture are bound to be inadequate because each of its many manifestations are extensive, complex and intan-gible.However, two criticalattributes may help to fill out the picture. First,in a healthy culture, the avoidance of accident and injury by all available means is the responsibility of every person in the organisation. Second, the integration of role behaviours and the consolidation of social norms create a common set of expectations, a way of life that transcends individual members. A culture is much more than the sum of its parts. This way of conceptualising safety management originated in the nuclear industry, in the aftermath of Chernobyl. But it is related to the similar concept of safety cli- mate, which in turn evolved from organisational climate (Schneider, 1975; Zohar, 1980). Some authors still prefer to use this term and others retain both climate and culture, claiming they are useful for di?erent purposes (Mearns et al., 1998). Byromand Corbridge (1997, p. 3), for exa