‘Ladder’-based safety culture assessments inversely predict safety outcomes

Abstract

There is little empirical evidence on the predictive value of safety culture assessments (SCAs) in relation to how accident-prone an organisation might be. Recently, Antonsen not just demonstrated how a quantitative SCA mispredicted future safety outcomes, but actually showed an inverse relationship between the assessment and subsequent critical incident investigation findings. To add to our understanding, this article presents research on whether a SCA has a predictive capacity for safety outcomes. Like in Antonsen's research, an opportunity emerged when a helicopter taxiing accident, resulting in a rotor strike occurred for a helicopter squadron that had just undergone a SCA. The assessment used ‘culture ladder’ rubrics for its findings, which allowed us to look for specific features in the subsequent independent accident investigation (in which the researchers were not involved). As with Antonsen's findings, our research shows that a ‘ladder’-based assessment has little predictive value. Any predictive value it has is in the inverse of the assessment findings. For instance, where the SCA showed that the safety culture was very mature regarding finding a balance between safety and the mission at hand or the breaking of rules, the accident investigation pointed these out as the causes of the accident.