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Teamwork in Safety Culture on a Practical Occupational Level in FourDifferent European Union Member States

Evangelos Markopoulos1, Antti Piirto2, Jarno Einolander2, Hannu Vanharanta2,Jussi Kantola3, Javier Bilbao4, Peter Odrakiewicz5

1) EMBROSS SITC& Co, Maroussi, Athens, Attica, Greece,2) School of Industrial Management, Tampere University of Technology, Pori, Finland

3) Jussi Kantola, Industrial Management, Vaasa University, Vaasa, Finland4) Javier Bilbao, Engineering School, University of Basque the Country, Bilbao, Spain

5) Peter Odrakiewicz, Poznan University College of Business, Poznan, Poland(email: epm@empross.com, antti.piirto@apsafety.fi, jarno.einolander@gmail.com, hannu.vanharanta@tut.fi,

jusilakan@gmail.com, Javier.bilbao@ehu.es, p.odrakiewicz@gmail.com)

Abstract

The European Union is facing real problems during its integration process concerning safetyboth on business and governmental levels. Our union consists of 27 member states and has 23different official languages in use. How can we understand safety culture in a similar way? Howcan we work together on safety issues to improve the degree of safety culture in the EuropeanUnion and in all European organizations? Safety culture is the basis for practical safety andtherefore intense development work as well as educational work should be started in theEuropean Union member states. It is said that safety comes first and only after that productivityand profitability, because without a safe environment, all the activities inside organizations anddifferent countries become dangerous and often impossible. Safety culture is a difficult conceptbecause many people perceive and understand that safety culture is created by professionals indifferent organizations and individuals are excluded from these discussions. Safety culture exists,however, in the minds of working people and therefore safety culture development and educationshould start from individuals. Safety culture ontology is one important tool for understandingwhat safety culture is. In addition, the commitment to work according to common objectives andgoals is very important in different occupational roles. This research attempts to focus on realteamwork in a combined approach: How can we improve the degree of safety culture andcommitment simultaneously in different member states and organizations together as a team?This paper describes our current efforts to achieve these objectives and shows how it is possible,both theoretically and practically using state of the art computer technology, to create commontools to improve the degree of safety culture as well as the degree of commitment on local,regional and European Union level, and also to identify and correlate the most important issuesin the management and leadership of this challenging concept. Our research in each country isbased on the same research instruments, which are translated into various official languages ofthe European Union.

Keywords: Ontology, safety culture, commitment, fuzzy logic, decision support systems,leadership, management, research instrument, qualitative, quantitative, synthesis, analysis.

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1. Introduction

The proposed research work addresses the concept development and pilot tests of web-basedtechnologies for industrial safety management and commitment in four European countries. Themain goal is to develop methods and tools to support decision making when preparing an actionplan to improve industrial safety and increase occupational commitment. This new methodologyused differs from traditional methodologies in two respects:

It takes into consideration more effectively the views of employees in middle and lowlevels of the organization. The methodology is based on Peter Senge’s work of creativetension, which has been further elaborated using the principles of positive psychology,the holistic concept of man, and circles of mind metaphor, Co-Evolute theory andmethodology developed at Tampere University of Technology, Pori, Finland.

The web-based analysis tool provides good visual information immediately and, in short,more results can be easily found at the data base. During the proposed research period,the visualization of results will be further developed following the ideas of visualmanagement, which is a business management technique that makes importantinformation visible to all employees.

The pilot tests need one-to-one translations from the original English versions of the safetyculture application as well as from the commitment application. In each of the four EU memberstates, i.e. Poland, Greece, Spain and Finland, this work has been done by our professionalresearch members. After testing the applications first with academic persons in each country, theidea is to test the applications in a real business context.

The overall architecture of this research is based on a wide construct starting from a scientificframework, theoretical framework, methodology as well a technical approach. The idea of thishas been that we can create ontologies with scientific information that can be tested in a real lifecontext. The approach is therefore “Episteme,” “Sophia,” “Techne” and “Phronesis.” Thefollowing overall figure of the whole co-evolutionary theory and methodology can be explainedvisually as follows (Figure 1):

From the Co-Evolute theory and methodology it is possible to create human object ontologies aswell as business object ontologies. From these ontologies, it is then possible to create computerapplications on a fuzzy logic platform, i.e. Evolute. In this research we use two applications, i.e.the safety culture Serpentine 2.0 and the commitment application Helix 3.0.

2. Safety Culture

An organization’s culture can be seen as a concept that reflects shared behaviours, beliefs,attitudes and values (Williams et al., 1989; Cooper, 2000). Glendon and Stanton (2000) revealthat organizational culture is created by all of the organization’s members and hence it is notowned by any one group.

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However, the uniform culture of a company can be questioned as Schein (1996) has observed.He stated that an organization’s culture actually consists of several subcultures. Likewise,Williams et al. (1989) argue that culture can vary from division to division, department todepartment and, workgroup to workgroup, and from individual to individual. Safety culture is apart of the overall culture of the organization (Cooper, 2000).

Figure 1 Co-Evolute theory and methodology

Therefore, it is natural that safety culture can also vary within the organization. Parker et al.(2006) point out that the size and complexity of modern organizations is the source of variationin safety culture. Thus, it is apparent that general measures of safety culture, based on oneoverall index or score, provide at best a crude indication of this complex phenomenon (Parker etal., 2006). Hence, new methodologies are needed which should provide a better understanding ofthe asymmetries in safety culture.

From the literature it can be seen that management is the key contributor to an organization’ssafety culture (Cox and Cox, 1991). However, the tools used by safety managers may notprovide the information they need. The crucial information is lost in sums, means, and indexes.

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From a practical point of view, it is essential that managers know what they should do in order toimprove safety. A manager has to gain valuable insight into the current situation, but without theproper tools, the task is rather difficult.

In this research, we introduce a novel way to analyse the asymmetries in safety culture. Safetyculture is a very important concept in European member states, because there are so manycultures as well as so many different languages. The way the workforce focuses, perceives,interprets and understands safety culture and how this difficult concept can be led both from theEuropean level, member state level, regionally, locally and on company level so that the degreeof safety culture is maintained as well as improved. This research focuses on safety culture,knowledge creation and learning concepts, which are difficult to articulate and manage inorganizations. The research shows the asymmetries between how people in industry view theircurrent situation, as well as how they would like to see the future. Subsequently, we presentpossibilities of grouping the dataset to show the asymmetry between the proactive vision and thecurrent and future desires to improve safety culture in industry. We also present the evidencesupporting the use of this methodology to reveal the asymmetries and why it is so important tounderstand them in terms of management and leadership.

3. Commitment

Organizational commitment refers to the extent to which an individual regards him or herself asan organizational person. In particular, organizational commitment refers to “the relative strengthof an individual's identification with and involvement in a particular organization” (Porter et al.,1974). Reichers(1985) defines organizational commitment as a process of identification with thegoals of an organization's multiple constituencies such as organization, occupation, job,supervisor, workgroup or organizational goals. For more than 20 years, the leading approach toorganizational commitment research has been Meyer and Allen’s (1984; 1997) three-component conceptualization of organizational commitment. They describe them asdistinguishable components, rather than types of attitudinal commitment and denominate them asaffective, continuance and normative commitment. They argue that these components reflectdistinct psychological states and that employees can experience each of these states to varyingdegrees.

According to this model, the affective component refers to employees’ emotional attachment to,identification with, and involvement in the organization. It refers to how strongly the employeeidentifies with, is involved in, and enjoys being a member of an organization. This dimension isclosely related to the definition of Porter et al. (1974). Secondly, continuance commitment (Allenand Meyer, 1990; Meyer and Allen, 1991) is the cost-related aspect of commitment. This refersto the commitment accumulated based on the sacrifices and investments made by an employeewhich would be lost if the activity were discontinued (e.g. pay, pension, seniority). This viewdraws upon Becker’s (1960) early ideas about the reasons leading to commitment.

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Lastly, the normative component refers to employees’ feeling of obligation to remain with theorganization (Meyer and Allen, 1997). Normative commitment sees commitment developingbased on internalized loyalty norms, i.e. the feeling of obligation to remain with an organization(Allen and Meyer, 1990; Meyer and Allen, 1991). They argued that each type ofcommitment ties the individual to the organization in different ways and will affect his/herbehaviour in the workplace differently.

Organizational commitment has been considered as a mediator variable in several causalmodels of employee behaviour. Often it has been included as a mediator focusing on predictingother employee reactions or behaviours (Mathieu and Zajac, 1990). As a consequence,organizational commitment has been linked to several personal variables, role states, and aspectsof the work environment, such as job characteristics or organizational structures.

From an antecedent point of view, it has been related to employees’ absenteeism, performance,turnover, and other behaviours. In addition, several other variables have been found to correlatewith organizational commitment, such as job involvement and job satisfaction (Mathieu andZajac, 1990). Additionally, DeCotiis and Summers (1987) found that commitment had a directpositive influence on employees’ work motivation and the objective measures of jobperformance, as well as a direct negative influence on their intention to leave and actual turnover(Mathieu and Zajac, 1990). In other words, employees who identify with and are involved intheir organization are committed, and presumably want to maintain membership in theirorganization and exert effort on its behalf (Mowday, Steers and Porter, 1979). Manyextensive studies support this prediction (c.f. Mathieu and Zajac, 1990; Cohen, 2000). Meyer andAllen (1997) emphasized the positive correlation between affective commitment and workattendance. A committed workforce will be more dedicated to their jobs and more motivated togive their time and effort to accomplish the required tasks.

As can be observed, the theoretical background has a very strong grounded content. The problemis however, gathering information so that it could easily produce general and specificinformation on the levels of commitment and engagement at collective and individualechelons and also show whether there are needs for significant improvement. We believe thatthis is a major management and leadership problem in business, especially today. Therefore,there is a need to create intelligent but simple to use tools so that organizations can collectinformation directly from all employees.

Our target has been to create an Internet-based commitment measurement system, using self-evaluation with statement questionnaires. Once self-evaluation has been conducted, managementleadership teams will be more aware of possible development gaps and can base theirobjectives for improvement on concrete bottom-up results. The methods within the methodologyare described in the next chapter.

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4. Research Methodology

The research methodology aims to combine a variety of different methods in order to obtain realsituation-aware computing, to define the degree of commitment as well as the safety culture. Themethodology is focused on covering both past and current data as well as current information forcreating an idea of how people evaluate the safety culture and commitment development nowand in the future in their own company (see Figure 2).

The basic principle is to try to see how people see their company in their minds (Vanharanta,2005). If they see it as ‘just a job’, then there is no need to do much since they do not care aboutit, but if people see their work as part of their life, as a society in which they live, theirorganization, group, team, etc., then more can be done with this type of employee to attain higherand higher levels of safety culture and commitment.

Figure 2. The ontology-based research methodology

Therefore, by analysing people’s behavioural patterns in their work, meetings, decisions, andother activities, very important information can be obtained about their past, to justify theirpresent and forecast their future (see Figure 2).

The holistic concept of man consists of corporeality, consciousness and situationality (See figure3, Vanharanta, et. al. 1997).

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Figure 3. Holistic Concept of Man Metaphor (Vanharanta et. al, 1997)

Each employee has a view of the object behavior (i.e. safety culture)in his or her organization. Ifthis is then combined with a larger view, a new dimension is projected of how people can havedifferent concepts of their situation and how they handle these concepts so that they can explaintheir situation. Moreover, it helps people to understand how different concepts build meanings intheir mind now and in the future (See Figure 3).

For example, it is important to envisage the future accessible safety culture i.e. What does itcontain? and How can the degree of safety culture be evaluated? Past, current and future data,information and knowledge are therefore very important components. The company must havescenarios, visions and plans of how a strong safety culture can be created. Each companymember envisages the company safety culture in her/his own way; however, a collective viewfirst provides a perception and understanding of the real dynamic safety culture, i.e. the currentsituation as well as how people would like it to be. People must first focus on the safety cultureand learn the concept of safety culture. With the application they can perceive and understandtheir own as well as the collective view of this important management and leadership issue.Commitment in the organization is analysed in a similar way.

Before the development of a research instrument for this methodology, it is important tounderstand the wider construct of the company activities that lead towards a strong safety cultureas well as commitment.

The main goal is now to improve and validate the statement questionnaire used in the web-basedinstruments by analysing the specific dimensions of safety and commitment on the basis ofresults from high-risk industries (such as shipping, energy, nuclear power, chemical,manufacturing, mining….) in Greece, Poland, Spain and Finland. In the first stage, the target isto obtain some data first with the academic consortium we have.

Object(s)

SituationalityConsciousnessCorporeality

ActivitiesMin

d

Wor

ldvi

ew

FeelingIntuition

Scientificinformation

Everydayknowledge

Will

BeliefSenses

Limbs

Brai

ns

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In Finland, we have already verified and validated the safety culture application in a Finnishindustrial park and the commitment application in several business contexts. In Spain we havemade a safety culture analysis in a chemical plant with our safety culture application and inPoland we have run both the commitment and safety culture applications with a group ofbusiness people. Now the main future research we are now targeting is to carry out business testruns in Greece and the Basque Country (Spain).

5. Research questions, hypothesis, research instruments and expected results

Our research questions are as follows:

How does the degree of collective commitment influence the degree of collective safetyculture in the organization?What kind of correlation is there between safety culture asymmetry and commitmentasymmetry?What is the interrelationship between the existing safety culture and existing commitmentlevel?What is the interrelationship between the goals of safety and commitment?Are there any differences in the degree of safety culture between these four countries?Are there any differences in the degree of commitment between the four countries?Are there any differences in the degree of motivation between the four countries?

We have developed the following hypotheses:

Research hypothesis 1: The degree of collective commitment has a significant influence on astrong safety culture

Research hypothesis 2:Ahigh degree of motivation maintains a strong safety culture inorganizations

In all types of activities, for organizations and for individuals at all levels, attention to safetyinvolves many elements:

Individual awareness of the importance of safetyKnowledge and competence, acquired by training and instruction of personnel and bytheir self-educationCommitment, requiring demonstration at senior management level of the high prioritygiven to safety and adoption by individuals of common safety goalsMotivation, through leadership, the setting of objectives, systems of rewards and throughindividuals' self-generated attitudesSupervision with readiness to respond to individuals' questioning attitudes

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Responsibility, through formal assignment and description of duties and theirunderstanding by individuals.

We expect the test runs to provide a large amount of data and information.

The expected results/outcomes and impacts to be considered are:

Sustainable improvement of industrial safetyDevelopment of a strong safety culture will result in more effective conduct of work anda sense of accountability among managers and employeesSustainable improvement of occupational commitmentBetter involvement and commitment of management and leadership in pursuing highstandards of safety.

We believe that the expected results, outcomes and impacts at employee level may be:

The results of this research when implemented in business will result in a direct andpermanent positive impact on safety, safety culture and on the degree of commitment ineach company and organizationContinuous evolution is most effectively sustained by focusing on improvementsgenerated by employees and taking advantage of changing technology

The main goal in our research is now to improve and validate the statement questionnaire used inthe web-based instrument by analysing the above-mentioned dimensions of safety andcommitment on the basis of the results from high-risk industries in Poland, Greece, Spain andFinland. The process for handling the issue will be as follows: preliminary testing, results fromthe industry, comparison of key factors influencing safety, assessment of the soundness of themethodology, feedback for improvement, and, after some iterations, presentation of the results.Each partner is responsible for the work in his/her country. Special emphasis will be placed onindustrial safety and the commitment of the people in the organization. All the researchers willuse the same research instruments, i.e. the Helix 3.0 application for commitment and Serpentine2.0 for safety culture.

These web-based instruments are now available in English, Finnish, Greek and Spanish and inPolish language. Extensive cooperation with the Poznan University College of Business and theUniversity of Girona will continue, towards broadening the scientific foundation of thedevelopment work.

Our research instrument Evolute is an online (web-based) system that supports specific-purposefuzzy logic applications to be used over the Internet (Kantola et al., 2006; Kantola, 2009;Vanharanta et al., 2012). The Evolute system allows the use of Serpentine 2.0 and Helix 3.0online by target groups.

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Evolute provides ontology-based “answers” to perceived linguistic propositions. The integralperception by a single person of all the presented propositions will produce an answer, called aninstance (Kantola, 2009). The collection of instances reflects the specific assets under scrutinyand forms an Instance Matrix (Kantola, 2009). The instance matrix, as a function of time, chartsan organization’s assets over time. The Instance Matrix is of great use for companies since itrepresents the collective mind of stakeholders/target groups.

The Evolute system utilizes fuzzy logic to capture the subjective, abstract and vague nature ofsafety culture and commitment without the individual having to convert any of this toa numericalscale. The goal is to capture a true bottom-up view of the current reality and envisioned future ofthe features and practices of the safety culture, knowledge creation and learning of anorganization. In addition to current states, employees are asked about desired future states. Thisgives them the opportunity to influence priorities of development actions. Thus, the methodreveals the proactive visions of the employees and therefore it can also be seen as a tool ofempowerment. (See figure 4. An employee is creating meanings of the current and future safetyculture)

Figure 4.The Mental-Physical Contrast in Safety Culture (Example)

The developed approach enables a comparison between desired future and current states. Also,asymmetries among respondents can be revealed, which is crucial information from a safetyculture as well as commitment point of view. This is precisely the information, data andknowledge that is required for the management and leadership of these difficult concepts.

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We place this to the situation-aware computing area. The results of the test runs help us to createthen a present situation-aware synthesis of meanings (See figure 5).

Figure 5.The model of situation-aware computing through ontologies

6. Stakeholder Impacts

Concerning the impact of our research, we have specified the contributions of the expectedoutcomes as follows:

- All organizations and all levels of an organization: organizations that want to achievelong-term success sustaining safety of operations and a more and more committedworkforce.

- The results of the research will gradually replace old-fashioned laborious methods inhuman resource management and leadership.

- The new methodology provides a fast and inexpensive way to obtain better and a newkind of bottom-up information from the organization to support top-down decisionmaking.

- Redistribution of decision making is not applicable. It will be dependent on the decisionsmade by whole organizations.

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- Regarding maintenance strategies, reduced potential for human error that could havedetrimental industrial and environmental safety consequences, and improved quality ofwork and work management systems are beneficial when improvement proposals comefrom employees.

- Test results are for personal development and confidential.- Collective results are intended for management and leadership.- Psychological and social impacts of the created analysis and synthesis are positive

because they provide better data, information as well as visualization of the results formanagement and leadership purposes.

Close cooperation with universities will help us to disseminate the results of the research andprovide a good forum for further development.

7. Conclusions

This European Union level teamwork is in its early stages. However, a lot of preparatory workhas already been done to enable this kind of research. Research in one country is no longersufficient when companies are multinational and when safety issues cross borders. An accidentin one country can easily affect other countries and low levels of occupational commitment maybe one of the most important factors generating such accidents. Highly motivated and committedoperators can run nuclear power plants, operate chemical plants, or drive transportationequipment in a way that guarantees a high degree of safety culture. A safe environment for boththe operators and the whole society should be a general common target. Individuals are in acentral position to make this happen. Knowledge creation and learning together will be theengine to help organizations in this important work.

7. References

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M.D.Cooper., 2000, “Towards a model of safety culture”, Safety Science, 36(2), 111-136

A.I. Glendon, N.A. Stanton, 2000. “Perspectives on safety culture”. Safety Science,34, 193–214.

E.H. Schein, 1996. “Three cultures of management: the key to organizational learning”. Sloan Management Review,Vol. 38, No.1, 9-20.

D. Parker, M. Lawrie, P. Hudson, 2006. “A framework for understanding the development of organisational safetyculture Safety Science”, Safety Science, Vol. 44, Issue 6, 551 - 562.

S. Cox, T. Cox, 1991. “The structure of employee attitudes to safety: a European example”. Work and Stress 5(2),93–106.

L. W. Porter, R. M. Steers, R. T. Mowday and P. V. Boulian, 1974, “Organizational commitment, job satisfaction

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E. Reichers, 1985, “A Review and Reconceptualization of Organizational Commitment”. Academy of ManagementReview, Vol. 10, Iss. 3. pp. 465-476.

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N. J. Allen and J. P. Meyer, 1990, “The measurement and antecedents of affective, continuance and normativecommitment to the organization”. Journal of Occupational Psychology, Vol. 63, Iss. 1, pp. 1-18.

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