Safety culture and safety management within the Norwegian-controlled shipping industry ; State of art, interrelationships, and influencing factors

This paper addresses safety culture on tankers and bulk carriers and which factors affect the safety culture onboard vessels. The empirical setting for the study is the Norwegian shipping industry. Safety management is a challenging issue within shipping for several reasons. First of all, life and work onboard a vessel is a 24 hour activity and the crew has few possibilities of interacting with the surrounding society. Secondly the geographical distance between the on-shore organization and the vessel may affect both the quality of those systems and plans developed on shore and their implementation on the vessels. The ship management is thus identified as a key factor to a sound safety culture along with the on shore crewing strategy. were affected by organisational and managerial factors – both on shore and at sea. Along with this the term safety culture started to gain a foothold also within shipping. The idea of safety culture within shipping was officially introduced on the 4th November 1993 by the adoption of a new resolution, the present SOLAS Convention 1974 Chapter IX, entitled “Management for the Safe Operation of Ships and for Pollution Prevention”, also known as the International Safety Management Code (ISM Code) (Le Meur 2003). Hence, the main purpose of this paper is to elaborate the following questions: − What characterises safety culture on tankers and bulk carriers? − Which factors affect the safety culture on board vessels? With reference to shipping, this article will more concretely analyse crewing strategies such as outsourcing of crewing management and the extended use of contract employment instead of permanent employment. Our hypothesis is that these conditions may contribute to an unfavourable and error-inducing working environment, i.e. poor communication between shore management and the ship management and the remaining crew, unworkable procedures, lack of loyalty to the organisation, dysfunctional interaction, fear of reprisals, which again counteract the development of a safety culture. 2 APPROACH TOWARDS SAFETY CULTURE There seems to be no clear consensus concerning the ontological, epistemological, and methodological questions related to the topic of safety culture. The main differences seem to be (1) Definition of the scope of safety culture and the relationship between culture and climate. (2) Which methods are regarded as most suitable for measurement. (3) The relationship to other organisational (safetyrelated) aspects (Cooper 2000, Guldenmund 2000, Neal, Griffin & Hart 2000, Peterson, Ashkanasy & Wilderom 2000, Sorensen 2002, Yule 2003). However, it is not the scope of this paper to problematise the concept of safety culture. As a point of departure we will apply Schein’s definition of organisational culture: “A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adoption and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems“(Schein 2004). Further we have decided to use a methodological framework presented by Cooper (2000), and the application of this framework will be discussed below. Cooper (2000) introduces a reciprocal model of safety culture that allows the multi-faceted and holistic nature of the concept to be fully examined by using a triangular methodology approach, depicted in figure 1. Figure 1. Reciprocal safety culture model (adopted from Cooper, 2000) Cooper’s (2000) model contains three elements: (1) The subjective internal psychological factors i.e. attitude and perceptions. (2) Observable on-going safety related behaviour. (3) The organisational situational features. According to Cooper (2000) these elements reflect those accident causation relationships found by a number of researchers, such as John Adams, Herbert William Heinrich and James Reason. The investigation of several serious shipping accidents such as Herold Free Enterprize (Department of Transport 1987), Exxon Valdes (National Transportation Safety Board 1990) and Scandinavian Star (Justisog politidepartementet 1991)is also congruent with their findings. The Herold Free Enterprize accident was partly caused by members of the crew not following best practice, but was also due to managerial pressure from the organization’s upper level to sail as early as possible, along with other mistakes made by the onshore management. Two years later when the US tanker “Exxon Valdes” grounded, the accident investigation determined several probable causes linked to human errors induced by managerial faults CONTEXT External Observable Factors Behavior Safety Behavior Person Safety Climate Situation Organisational Factors Internal Psychological Factors in the upper levels of the organisation. At the vessel, the third mate failed to properly manoeuvre the vessel, possibly due to fatigue and excessive workload. The master failed to provide a proper navigation watch, possibly due to impairment from alcohol. At the onshore part of the organisation, the shipping company fails to supervise the master and provide a rested and sufficient crew for the “Exxon Valdez”. In addition to this effective pilot and escort services were lacking. The following year, in 1990, there was a fire on the passenger liner "Scandinavian Star". In the aftermath of this accident the investigation brought into focus organisational and managerial faults with regard to a lack of competence and training, but also weaknesses in the wider social-technical system. These weaknesses consisted of ownership separated from management, unsatisfactory control routines by the flag state and, in general, an overall maritime system with a lack of transparency. Further, Cooper’s (2000) three elements will be outlined more in detail, starting with safety related behaviour. 2.1 The importance of safety related behaviour Herbert William Heinrich work (published in 1931 Industrial Accident Prevention) is the basis for the theory of Behaviour-Based Safety (BBS), which holds that as many as 80-90 percent of all workplace accidents are caused by human error and unsafe acts (Tinmannsvik, 2008). Schein’s (2004) definition of culture does not clearly address observable behaviour patterns, but behaviour is regarded to be partly determined by a person’s perceptions, feelings and thoughts. However, Schein (2004) regards behavioural patterns as a manifestation of a culture existing at a higher level in the organisation, and not as culture itself. When it comes to BBS, the current theories posit that safety culture, and a reduction of accidents may be achieved through continuous attention to three domains: (1) Environmental factors such as equipment, tools, physical layout procedures, standards, and temperature. (2) Person factors such as people’s attitudes, beliefs, and personalities. (3) Behaviour factors, such as safe and at-risk work practices, referred to as the Safety Triad (Geller 2001). When adopting this approach humans are seen as a cause of accidents, whereupon interventions to enhance safety are aimed at changing attitude or behavior (i.e. poster campaigns, training, procedures and so on, or changing the technology they operate). This orientation towards risk and safety management has traditionally been and still is adopted from the majority of the shipping companies. The BBSapproach has been criticised for placing too much responsibility on the people operating the systems, assuming that they are responsible for the outcome of their actions (Dekker & Dekker 2006). An alternative view is to recognise human error not as a cause of accidents, but as a consequence or symptom of organisational trouble deeper within the organisation, arising from strategic or other top level decisions. This includes resource allocation, crewing strategy and contracting (Dekker, Dekker 2006, Reason 2001, Reason, Hobbs 2003). An organisation is a complex system balancing different, and often also conflicting, goals towards safety and production in an aggressive and competitive environment (Rasmussen 1997), a situation that to a large extent is current within shipping. The BBS approach towards safety often implies that more automation and tighter procedures should be added in order to control the human actions. However, the result may be that more complexity is added to the system. This in combination with the organisation's struggle to survive in the competitive environment, leads to the system becoming even more prone to accidents (Perrow 1999) (Dekker & Dekker 2006, Reason 2001, Reason & Hobbs 2003) However, the concept of focusing on the human side of safety is not wrong. After all, the technology and production systems are operated, maintained and managed by humans, and as the final barrier towards accidents and incidents they are most of the time directly involved. The proponents of the BBS approach argue that behaviour control and modification may bring a shift in an organisation's safety culture, also at the upper level, but this is most likely if the focus is not exclusively addressing observed deficiencies at the organisation's lower levels (DeJoy 2005). DeJoy (2005) calls attention to three apparent weaknesses related to the BBS approach: (1) By focusing on human error it can lead to victimblaming. (2) It minimises the effect of the organisational environment in which a person acts. (3) Focusing on immediate causes hinders unveiling the basic causes, which often reside in the organisational environment. Due to this, we will also include the organisational environment in the safety culture concept, as proposed by Cooper (2000). 2.2 The relation to organisational factors When human error is not seen only as a cause of accidents, but as a symptom and consequence of problems deeper inside the organisation, or what Reason (2001,2003) refers to as latent organisational factors, emphasis is placed on w