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Clarifying culture

Verna Blewett PhD, Director, New Horizon Consulting Pty Ltd (June 2011)

Projectbackground

This paper was initiated as part of the development process of the Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy 2012-2022 (Australian Strategy). This paper is intended to inform and support the Australian Strategy by articulating and analysing the existing evidence base for Safe Work Australia to consider and by identifying the strategic implications for the Australian Strategy of organisational culture.

Executive summary

There are many myths and misconceptions about organisational culture as it relates to health and safety.Many have envisaged a discrete “safety” culture in organisations. Moreover, this is seen as being concrete, predictable and able to be managed or manipulated in some way.In fact, there is no “safety” culture that can be divorced from the wider organisational culture. An organisational culture is largely invisible, subtle, and can only be detected through indicators which are themselves not the culture. Rather the organisational culture is the context or environment within which the organisation is understood. Culture is so elusive that it does not and cannot provide a clear explanation for failures in technological systems.

There are dangers inherent in trying to manipulate something believed to be simple and predictable when in fact it is complex and unstable. However, there is evidence that certain elements can influence an organisational culture to enable and support positive health and safety outcomes.

The UK Health and Safety Executive suggests safety culture is influenced by:

  • management commitment and style
  • employee involvement
  • training and competence
  • communication
  • compliance with procedures, and
  • organisational learning.

Thecultural dimensions most closely associated with good work health and safety management in the Australian context have been identified as:

  • mindfulness
  • workgroup cohesion
  • trust in management
  • organisational justice
  • supervisor support, and
  • role clarity.

Although organisational culture is not able to be managed, it may be malleable. This means, rather than controlling a culture as if it were an objectexternal to the individuals within the organisation, culture can be changed from within through the strategic application of evidence-based initiatives.

To separate work health and safetyculture from organisational culture and treat it differentlycan alienate work health and safety from key organisational decision-making.

Employee attitude surveys fail to identify the mechanisms and systems that shape the organisation. Instead data from a combination of qualitative methods and quantitative methods should be collected,thencompared and analysed to form an evidence base.

Implications for the new Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy

Culture is an important and increasingly dominant aspect of the work health and safety sphere of activity. It is thereforecentral to achieving the 2022 Outcomes within the Australian Strategy.

The Australian Strategy must be informed by evidence and initiate actions that will lead to reduced exposure to health and safety risks in workplaces.

The following initiatives can support the achievement of the Australian Strategy vision:

  • Use evidence obtained through multi-method research to form the foundation for strategies for regulators and policy makers.
  • Adopt an evidence-based approach that promotes what is known about culture and dismisses supposition and conjecture.
  • Remove references to “health” and/or “safety” in association with culture and leadership.
  • Increase emphasis on integration of work health and safety into the business systems and processes across organisations.
  • Reduce the emphasis on ‘managing’ culture; instead focus on controlling risks at the source.
  • Differentiate between safety culture/climate and behavioural change.
  • Build and develop the evidence base. Develop methods for capturing the knowledge that has arisen through experience with organisational culture as it affects health and safety, and make it available for peer review.

Contents

Project background

Executive summary

Introduction and background

Organisational culture and climate

Safety culture and climate

Barriers and enablers of organisational culture

Strategic policy implications for the new Australian Strategy

Conclusion

References

Introduction and background

There has been considerable debate about ‘safety culture’ in the literature, as well as among health and safety professionals; but as Hopkins suggests, “safety culture is an attractive idea…it is not, however, a straightforward idea” (Hopkins, 2002: 14). The literature shows limited agreement on the concept of safety culture. Despite a 30-year history there is no agreed definition, theory is under-developed, and research is fragmented. Perhaps the muddle of mixed concepts arises from the nature of the genesis of the term, while the introduction of the term ‘safety climate’ has further muddied the waters. Many papers on the topic commence with a statement suggesting that there is general agreement about the importance of safety culture/climate to workplace health and safety, go on to state that safety culture/climate is not well understood, and then offer a contribution that fails to add clarity to the domain because it is founded on poorly articulated first principles or theory. Whilst the offering might be interesting and thoughtful, it may add to the confusion rather than provide lucidity.

This is not just a question of semantics, epistemology or ideology that can be ignored; rather it goes to the core of thinking about workplace health and safety and the translation of knowledge into practical application in organisations. Therefore, in examining the literature this paper uses as a filter the question, “how does this contribute to knowledge, or provide evidence, that will help make workplaces healthy and safe?” It examines the broader concept of organisational culture, describes the place that workplace health and safety has in this, and considers how the current debate about safety culture and safety climate might be turned to provide insight into the features of organisations that might lead to healthy and safe workplacesand aid the development of effective interventions.

Organisational culture and climate

Why is organisational culture important?

Ask people in any organisation about the nature of their workplace and it’s likely that they’ll be able to describe their impressions. Workers and managers alike are able to discern differences in the atmosphere of organisations or parts of organisations and may use general descriptors such as casual, warm, friendly, tense, or uninviting (or other more colourful terms) to give the impression of the workplace. They may insist that these features of the workplace make a difference to the function and outcome of the organisation (S. P. Clarke, 2006). These descriptive features of the organisation might be regarded as a manifestation of the organisational culture; in folkloric terms, ‘the way we do things around here’.

Understanding what makes organisations ‘tick’ might give insight into how they can be structured, or how they might operate, to be more effective, efficient, productive, healthy and safe. Understanding how culture operates at various levels in organisations can help to explain the everyday frustrations of organisational operation, as well as provide insight into our personal assumptions and how as individuals we might fit within, or influence, organisational culture (Schein, 2010: 2). So understanding what organisational culture is, how it is manifest, how it might be assessed (or measured) and how it might be altered or manipulated are areas of management that have had increasing focus in recent years.

Defining organisational culture

Writers on organisations come from a variety of traditions such as psychology, anthropology, sociology and organisational behaviour, and each tradition has a different way of viewing how organisations work and what contributes to them not working. Academic background influences how researchers view organisations, and how they examine organisational culture. For example, in general psychologists approach organisational culture from a positivist perspective attempting to quantify the features of culture using survey instruments, while anthropologists use qualitative approaches, such as ethnography, to describe what is observed and to look for meaning.

Several reviews of organisational culture have been written in the last five years describing the evolution of the concept from the 1950s(Andriopoulos & Dawson, 2009), its themes (Sun, 2008), and how it applies in specific industries for example, nursing (S. P. Clarke, 2006) or rail (Weyman, Pidgeon, Jeffcott, & Walls, 2006). More recently questions have been asked about the relevance of the debate to organisations that are structured on non-traditional lines; for example those that engage a contingent workforce, where contracting is a feature, or where shift work predominates (Bellot, 2011).

In their wide-ranging work on the theory of organisations, Mary Jo Hatch and Ann Cunliffe (2006) describe the rise of the socially-constructed concept of organisational culture from its wider anthropological and sociological roots in human culture. They examine the definitions of organisational culture that arose in the mid-twentieth century onwards and note that while it is the concept of ‘sharing’ that is common to them all, ‘sharing’ itself can have contradictory meanings.

‘Sharing’ can be seen as developing unity (Schein, 2010) with shared norms, values, assumptions and beliefs, along with the so-called observable ‘artefacts’ of shared behaviour. Schein has moved little from his early views on organisational culture and most recently defines it is as:

… a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, which 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, 2010: 18).

This definition while compelling at first reading views organisational culture as something that is unitary, agreed, and relatively static; develops over time in a stable organisation and can be passed on to newcomers. The relevance of this to 21st Century organisations is debatable. The changing labour market and increasing use of novel organisational forms with distributed organisation members, work from home, and work in ‘the cloud’ may change the need for and the capacity to reach agreement on cultural norms.

Other theorists emphasise that ‘sharing’ can also be a form of fragmentation (as in sharing a pizza) and therefore place emphasis on differences (Meyerson & Martin, 1987), asserting symbols and stories can demonstrate this (Morgan, 1997). The concept of shifting subcultures in organisations arises from theories of culture as fragmentation (implying conflicted differences) and differentiation (implying useful differences). For example Hofstede (1998) described three distinct subcultures in an insurance company: a professional, an administrative and a customer-interface subculture. “The cultural rifts between the subcultures could be readily recognised in the company’s practice, and had tangible consequences” (Hofstede, 1998). While some interpretations of organisational culture seek to explain unity in organisations, others use organisational culture to describe subcultures with varying degrees of fragmentation and differentiation in organisations that explain and perhaps encourage diversity (S. P. Clarke, 2006; Meyerson & Martin, 1987).

Schein defines culture on four levels: macrocultures, organisational cultures, subcultures and microcultures(Schein, 2010: 2). Macroculture refers to national cultures based on ethnicity or religion but might also include occupational groups such as medicine and law that exist internationally. Macroculture provides the overarching context for organisational culture. Organisational culture (or corporate culture) he suggests exists in “private, public, non-profit and government organisations” (Schein, 2010: 2). Subcultures are also organisational and he defines these as occupational groups that exist within organisations that have their own specific values and norms. Microcultures he describes as existing within “small, coherent units…that cut across occupational groups” (Schein, 2010: 2).

At this point it is interesting to note the terms subculture and microculture are used reasonably consistently in the management literature to refer to groups of people with common traits or objectives. It is rarely used to describe areas of management action or responsibility (such as finance or marketing) in the way ‘safety culture’ has developed.

Theorists are drawing on an increasingly wide range of metaphors, including music and literature, to describe organisational culture and to investigate further questions about how it might be influenced (Hatch & Cunliffe, 2006: 213); thus the field remains fluid. Current explorations seek the relationship between culture, power and influence, and leadership (Lok & Crawford, 1999; Schein, 2010) that may lead to new theories of organisations. Bryson suggests there is a need to use theories of organisational culture to improve working lives by examining dominant, emergent and residual cultures following organisational change (Bryson, 2008), while Morrill and Raz examine organisations as societies or communities of practice (Morrill, 2008; Raz, 2007). These shifts in the theoretical development of the concept of organisational culture may well have application for improving work health and safety.

Organisational climate

Organisational climate is perceived as a manifestation of organisational culture, but it is another construct that is unclear in the literature. Its origins were in the work of Kurt Lewin in the 1930s (as cited in Bellot 2011) and preceded the coining of the term ‘organisational culture’ by Pettigrew in 1979 (as cited in Bellot 2011). The most commonly quoted definition was coined by Tagiuri and Litwin (1968) and states that organisational climate is

…the relatively enduring organizational environment that (a) is experienced by the occupants, (b) influences their behavior, and (c) can be described in terms of the values of a particular set of characteristics or attributes of the environment (Tagiuri & Litwin, 1968: 25).

The similarity to definitions of organisational culture is obvious, so it is unsurprising there is considerable muddle in the literature over these intertwined concepts. Other authors conclude the two concepts “address the same phenomenon” (Denison, 1996) and there is significant fit between the two concepts (Yahyagil, 2006). Schein has been influential in defining climate as “…only a surface manifestation of culture”; a group of ‘artefacts’ or constructs that are visible and measurable (Schein, 1990) that include documents such as organisation charts and statements of policy. More recently he narrowed his definition of organisational climate to the

…feeling that is conveyed in a group by the physical layout and the way in which members of the organisation interact with each other, with customers, or with other outsiders (Schein, 2010: 15).

Indeed, he paints ‘climate’ as one of a list of 11 “observable events and underlying forces” together forming an anthropological model of organisational culture (Schein, 2010: 14-16). At best ‘climate’ might be regarded as a proxy for culture, but there is little clarity in the literature about the validity or reliability of this approach. Nonetheless, the construction of climate as the behavioural manifestation of culture underpins behaviourist approaches to work health and safety. Can manipulation of these surface manifestations (as demonstrated in individual behaviour) lead to the development of healthy and safe workplaces? The warning about this use comes from Schein himself:

Some culture analysts see climate as the equivalent to culture, but it is better thought of as the product of some of the underlying assumptions and is, therefore, a manifestation of the culture … it is both easy to observe and very difficult to decipher. (Schein, 2010: 24).

All in all these are slippery concepts; as Schein warns us, at the level of artefacts (including climate) there is considerable ambiguity in interpretation by observers—essentially, interpretation of cultural artefacts (including climate) is not possible unless the observer “has experienced the culture at the deeper level of assumptions” (Schein, 2010:24). They are only able to be known by those in the know.

Both culture and climate are deemed to share constructs such as leadership (Al-Shammari, 1992), organisational socialisation (Taormina, 2008), employee participation (Nerdinger, 2008) and effectiveness (Aydin & Ceylan, 2009). So it seems that the culture-climate debate is increasingly arid, as Bellot summarises:

In fact, it is clear that both culture and climate attempt to address the interplay between individuals and their surroundings, but it becomes a circular debate to determine which produces and/or affects the other (Bellot, 2011).

Most recently the literature describes the difference between organisational culture and organisational climate as a matter of research method. Culture tends to be researched qualitatively (with anthropological methods) while climate tends to be researched quantitatively (through surveys) (Asif, 2011).

For our purposes, the debate needs to turn to the question “what makes a difference?” and if that is culture, climate or a combination of these and other constructs, then as people who want to influence improvement in the lives of working women and men, this is what needs to be identified and addressed. This paper takes the middle ground and uses the terms ‘culture’ and ‘climate’ (both organisational and ‘safety’) interchangeably.