Japanese Journal of Applied Psychology
2016, Vol. 42 (Special edition), 67–72

Research Report

Evaluation of Comprehensive Safety Culture Including Inter-Organization
in a Multi-Tiered Organization
Tomoki YOMURA*1, Kazuhiro FUJIKAKE*2, Guirong SHI*3,
Satoshi HOSODA*4, and Shiichiro INOUE*1
The division of labuor and outsourcing have been increasing in many industrial sectors in Japan. In order to establish a comprehensive safety culture covering all related organizations, it is insufficient to measure and develop
safety culture only within an individual organization. This study aims to measure inter-organizational safety culture in industrial organizations, consisting of a contractee, an original contractor and subcontractors. A questionnaire survey was conducted for maintenance personnel in an energy plant. The questionnaire survey revealed that
this plant have poor inter-organizational safety culture evaluation results due to very low scores from the originalcontractor and subcontractors, even though they scored excellently at contractee in-house evaluation ( manager–
field supervisor–worker mutual evaluation). From the exercise, the importance of evaluating comprehensive safety
culture including inter-organization was confirmed.
key words: safety culture, organization, multitiered, industry

Introduction
In recent years, to ensure safety in the industrialorganization, the safety culture of organization has
been regarded as important. A numbers of studies
have conducted regarding the definition of safety
culture, it s element and it s evaluation (e.g., IAEA,
1991; Cox & Cox, 1991; Schein, 1992; Ostrom, Wilhelmsen, & Kaplan, 1993; Reason, 1997). In thesestudies, method of cognitive and behavior that are
related to the staff safety such as, attitudes, believes,values, the safety activity and it s structure in the organization and the situation of sharing these subjects between the staffs in the organization are regarded as the main element of the safety culture.
Therefore, the authors base on these studies results, think that the definition of safety culture is defined by the mutual relationship between 1) the
structure of system, facilities, activities made to en-sure safety 2) the attitude, behaviors of organization
members against them and 3) situation of sharing
these subjects between the staffs in the organization.
In addition, according this definition, we have developed the Safety Culture Assessment Tool (SCAT)
for industrial organization to enable them to understand it s safety culture easily and can evaluate thesafety culture specifically and comprehensively (Shi,
Hosoda, Suganuma, Okumura, Yomura, & Inoue,
2004; Yomura, Hosoda, & Inoue, 2015).
Evaluation score and shared score are 2 safety culture evaluation indexes (Figure 1). The evaluation
score is the evaluation index for the staff safety attitude against the safety structure, and the sharedscore is the evaluation index for determining theevaluation s agreement degree between the staffs in
the organization.
To measure the sharing situation in the organization, we divided the organizational members into 3*1 System Safety Research Group, The Ohara Memorial Institute for Science of Labour, J. F. Oberlin University, 3F, 1–1–12
Sendagaya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 151–0051, Japan*2 Nagoya University, Institute of Innovation for Future Society, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, Aichi 464–8601, Japan*3 College of Interhuman Symbiotic Studies, Kanto Gakuin University, 1–50–1 Mutsuurahigashi, Kanazawa-ku, Yokohama-city, Kanagawa 236–8501, Japan& The Ohara Memorial Institute for Science of Labour*4 College of Sociology, Kanto Gakuin University, 3–22–1 Kamariyaminami, Kanazawa-ku, Yokohama-city, Kanagawa 236–
8502, Japan& The Ohara Memorial Institute for Science of Labour（ 68 ）

Japanese Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 42

Table 1 Evaluation fields and items
Evaluation
fields(10)

Figure 1 Evaluation indexes of the tool
Note: Evaluation score and shared score are safety culture
evaluation indexes in SCAT.

Evaluation items
Within anorganization(36)

Safetydeclaration

Recognition
Understanding
Review
Penetration●

Safety andproductivity

Priority
Level of involvement
Awareness●

Safety rules

Documentation
Improvement of procedures
Observance of procedures

Responsibility, Authority
authority and Review of role
Participation in improvement
roles
activities
Troubleresolving

Figure 2 Evaluation structure within an organization
Note: Each person evaluated their own tier and the othertiers within the organization.

following tiers and made it mutually measurement(Figure 2).
1) Manager: the person whose rank is higher than
the field supervisor and run the management.
2) Field supervisor: the general management who
has the lowest organizational tier and is the responsible of workplace.
3) Worker: the person who has not generally any
subordinate in the organization.
The SCAT evaluation consists of 36 items from 10
fields and has been made based on ASCOT guideline (IAEA, 1996), ASCNI report (HSC, 1993), andSurvey Tools (HSE, 1997), Cheyne, Cox, Oliver, &Tomas (1998), Cox & Cheyne (1998), Wilpert(1999) (Table 1).
On the other hand, in recent years, in many sectors of industry in japan, division of labor and outsourcings have increased (Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, 2013) and the number of theorganization that all productive activity are carriedout by itself has decreased tend. For example, in themaintenance section of energy plant, several organizations conduct the related work from the drawing
up the plan to the enforcement by role sharing as

Interorganization(12)

Experience of analysis
Analysis of human-factors
Reporting procedure
Implementation of measures
Involvement in improvement
Awareness of improvement●●●

Education and Provision of training
training
Evaluation
Contents
Trouble response training
Materialization●

Information
channelTop-down channel
Communication
Bottom up channel

●
●
●

Work
environment

Understanding ofenvironmental
Conditions
Attitude to improvement
Awareness

Safetyactivities

Use of safety system
Evaluation
Indirect department

Safetyoperation

Use of research institutions
External audit
Service contract●●●

Note: ● are 12 items on inter-organization.

bellow:
1) Contractee: drawing up the maintenance plan2) Original contractor: drawing up the work plan
specifically3) Subcontractor: enforcement the work
These organizations communicate and coordinate

T. Yomura et al.: Evaluation of Comprehensive Safety Culture

Figure 3 Comprehensive safety culture
Note: Within an organization is between tiers, inter-organization is between organizations.

mutually to running organization safety. So, relatedorganizations increase and if the organizations havethe multi-layer structure the risk may occur not only
within an organization but between the organizations as well. For example, if the original contractor
draws up the plan without the awareness of the facilities or methods of work, the subcontractor s staffs
may be forced to do work against their will and receive injuries. On the other hand, the safety policies
taken by the ordering organization may cause theunsafe movement in the original contractor andsubcontractor.
So, to ensure the entirely safety it is not enough toconsider the safety culture of one organization. But
the comprehensive studies conducted on the safety
culture including the relationship between several
organizations can hardly be seen.
Therefore, the purpose of this study is to evaluateof safety culture inter-organization in the industrialorganization, including contractee, original contractor and subcontractor by using the SCAT (Figure 3).
Methods
1.

Questionnaire Survey
We researched on the contractee, original contractor and subcontractor of an energy plant which
are related to the maintenance management. The
original contractor was the subsidiary company ofcontractee. At this plant, there was one contractee
and one original contractor but multiple subcontractors. The number of participants (maintenancestaffs) is as bellow: contractee 100, original contractor 43, subcontractors 54, and the response rate wasmore than 90%.
Our questionnaire was consisted of two parts: 1)
evaluation of safety culture for within an organiza-（ 69 ）

tion, 2) evaluation of safety culture for inter-organization.
1) Evaluation of safety culture within an organization
We used the SCAT for evaluating of safety culture
for within an organization.
The reply each person evaluated both his own tierand the other person s tier in his own organization(Figure 2). So, each person should reply to 1same
question 3 times for 3 tiers. Questionnaire respondents were asked 36 questions about each of thethree tiers, thus they were asked 108 questions in total. They were asked the following question: As amember of your particular tier within the company,
how do you feel that the managerial, field supervisor, and worker tiers contribute to all aspects of safety? Participants used 8-point Linkert-type scales (1.
disagree ~8. strongly agree) to respond to each
items.
Evaluation score: the mean value of evaluation
which each tier conducted about the each item.
Shared score: first, for example, the difference between mean of evaluation by manager about the
manager and the mean value of evaluation by theother 2 tiers about the manager was selected as thebasic data. Then, after removing the total sum of basic data by the unbiased variance of all scales, andreducing an effect of variance within the tiers, we selected it as logarithm. This shared score goes up anddown when the inter-tier evaluation coincidence increase and decrease. Then, we used the data of 427
organizations and standardized both evaluation
score and shared score (mean value: 50, standard
deviation: 10) and then called them standardized
evaluation score and standardized shared score.
For more details such as SCAT items, evaluation
structure and calculation method of index please refer to Yomura, Hosoda, & Inoue (2015).
2) Evaluation of safety culture inter-organization
We made modification of SCAT and evaluated thesafety culture for inter-organization.
With careful consideration for reduction of private burden to participants, we selected following 12
items of 36 items used for evaluation of safety culture for inter- organization: Recognition of Declaration , Priority of Safety , Observance of Procedures , Authority for Safety , Implementation of
Measures , Provision of Training , Top-down

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Japanese Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 42

Channel , Communication , Bottom-up Channel , Attitude to Improvement , Use of Safety System , Service Contract (Table 1).
We selected the items had been regarded as more
important items for safety culture of inter-organization and added 3 items to the all item of information
channel field. All these procedures were conductedby several researcher of industrial-organization psychology using the opinion of target organization
staffs.
Contractees, original contractors and subcontractors all evaluated each other and themselves with regard to inter-organizational safety culture evaluation(Figure 4). Each organization was including managers, field supervisors and workers.
Each respondent evaluated 12 items regarding
about three tiers, thus they answered questions. Participants used 8-point Linkert-type scales (1. disagree ~8. strongly agree) to respond to each items.
Evaluation score: the mean value of evaluation
which each tier conducted about the each item (Figure 5). And as the number of data was small, thestandardization procedure was not conducted about
inter-organization.

Figure 4 Evaluation structure inter-organization
Note: Each person evaluated their own organization andthe other organization at the plant.

Figure 5 Evaluation indexes of the tool inter-organization
Note: Evaluation score and shared score are safety culture
evaluation indexes inter-organization.

2.

Ethical considerations
We explained the safety officer and the person responsible in each organization about the study purpose, content and convinced them their personal information would be protected from leaking. And
also we received the agreement of organizational
representative in the labor union as long as we
could. The period for reply was 2 weeks and the participants could get the questionnaire takeaway. After
filling up them, the put it into an envelope and input
it to the collection box equipped in their workplace.
We did our best to strictly control the personal information of participant to prevent leakage to outside and after finishing analysis disposed the questionnaire.
Results
1.

Evaluation of safety culture within an organization
The results of standardized evaluation score andstandardized shared score that are regarded as thesafety culture evaluation index is shown in form of
two-axel that is called SCAT-MAP (Figure 6). Whenthe horizontal axis (standardized evaluation score)
has a high degree, the safety attitude and behavior
has a high level too. When the vertical axis (standardized shared score) shows a high degree it means
that, in the same organization (between tiers), recognition falls in line (with each other). So, we areable to find out the relative position of organization
safety culture through these two-axes.
We showed the comprehensive results of our target, contractee, original contractor and subcontractor by using SCAT-MAP. According to the results,
contractee has the high (top right) degree at both
evaluation score and shared score (Figure 6). In contrast, original contractor and subcontractor have relatively low degree and are plotted to lower-left direction. To put it shortly, from the safety culture forwithin an organization perspective, the contractee
has higher level of safety culture than original contractor and subcontractor.
2. Evaluation of safety culture inter-organization
Then, according to the figure 7, we can find outthat there is a significant difference in several items
between the self-evaluation and evaluation fromothers in the contractee (i.e., Priority of Safety ,F(2, 182)＝14.395, p＜.001; Attitude to Improve-T. Yomura et al.: Evaluation of Comprehensive Safety Culture

ment , F(2, 168)＝12.183, p＜.001). Contractee
showed high degree of evaluation value of contractee approximately. In contrast, original contractor
and subcontractor have a lower degree of evaluation
value of contractee. Specifically, we can see the low
evaluation value by original contractor about Prior-（ 71 ）

ity of Safety , Bottom-up Channel , Attitude to
Improvement , Use of Safety System and Service
Contract . On the other hand, however the evaluation of contractee within an organization (mutual
evaluation between manager, field supervisor andworker) is a great value, but evaluation of originalcontractor and subcontractor about the contractee
has a low value.
Discussion

Figure 6

SCAT MAP: Overall evaluation, within an organization
Note: The higher (right) on the x-axis, the higher revel ofthe attitude toward safety. The higher (top) on the
y-axis, the higher the degree of agreement regarding the safety situation.

In this study, we actually evaluated the safety culture about the within an organization and inter-organization which is consisted of contractee, originalcontractor and subcontractor by using SCAT. According the results, we could find out the evaluationof safety culture was high within an organization but
also low inter-organization.
When all tiers, manager, field supervisor andworker evaluate themselves highly, both evaluation
score and shared score goes up as well. From thesafety culture perspective these kind of organization
as shown in the first quadrant of SCAT-MAP are regarded as the ideal organization (Yomura et al.,2015). But maybe it is not true. It may is just an excessive feeling of self-satisfaction. To ensure thesafety in the industrial place, it is very important tomake it clear if this organization is an ideal organization or it is just an excessive feeling of self-satis-

Figure 7 Mutual evaluation of contractees, inter-organization at the Plant
Note: The higher evaluation score, the higher level of the attitude toward safety.
Error bars reflect within-subjects SEM. Asterisks indicate significant differences (*p＜.05, **p＜.01, ***p＜.001, n.s.:
not significant) by ANOVA and Tukey HSD.

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Japanese Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 42

faction. Therefore, this study which evaluated thesafety culture not only for within an organization
but also for inter-organization would be useful toensure the safety.
As mentioned in the opening sentence, presently
in many sectors of industry in japan, division of labor and outsourcings have increased (Ministry of
Health, Labour and Welfare, 2013). When a company decided to outsource, make it s operation efficiency and try to make cost reduction the risk information is prevented from flowing. In these cases, itis necessary to evaluate the related safety culture
throughout the entire organization firstly, and then,according to it s results it is required to heighten thesafety culture level by sharing the safety policy, information and structure more actively.
Naturally, we were not able to find out exactly
why contractee evaluate their own organization
highly and why original contractor and subcontractor show a low evaluate about the contractee. We
hereafter will be able to clarify the fragile parts ofsafety culture more specifically by making clear thecause of the evaluation and the disagreement interorganization by interview surveys.
Aknowledgment
This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI
Grant Number JP26380863.
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