Development of a Conceptual Safety Culture Framework to Enhance Workplace Safety

Abstract

Safety at workplace has always been neglected by firms for greater productivity. From last decades, safety concerns and attention to safety has rapidly increased due to a chain of terrible events occurring across many different industries (e.g., Chernobyl, Upper, Big-Branch Mine, Davis-Besse etc.) which caused havoc in the society. Many organizations have started to focus on promoting a positive safety culture to make people understand and prevent disasters from happening. There is a widespread academic literature devoted to safety culture, and the Department of Energy has also published a significant number of documents stating safety culture. The purpose of the paper was to develop a framework that would build the development and sustenance of sound safety culture in the workplace. After developing a framework for better safety culture, a model is proposed which shows that job satisfaction is the main aspect of safety culture for any individual that ultimately decides their internal psychological factors such as values, beliefs, attitudes and perception towards safety which can be measured and observed through their behavior and moreover the method of assessment and validation of the proposed model with the help of questionnaires has also being highlighted in this report.