Safety management systems: Performance differences between adopters and non-adopters

Safety management systems: Performance differences between

adopters and non-adopters

Safety Science 47 (2009) 155–162Eleonora Bottani, Luigi Monica, Giuseppe Vignali

Speaker: Jenny2008/12/10

Outline

PurposeIntroductionHypotheses developmentSurvey phaseResults and DiscussionConclusions

Purpose

whether the performance of safety management systems (SMSs) adopting and non-adopting companies statistically differ

Introduction

Human factor plays a important role in an organization’s safety performance.

(Attwood et al., 2006; Hughes and Kornowa-Weichel, 2004)

Unsafe behavior resulted from latent failures in the organization and management systems.

(Hughes and Kornowa-Weichel; Kawka and Kirchsteiger, 1999)

SMS: a set a policies and practices aimed at positively impacting on the employees’ attitudes and behaviors with regards to risk.

(Fernandez-Muniz et al., 2007)

Introduction

Benefits of SMS:Achieve and maintain high level safety

(Mitchison and Papadakis, 1999)

improve safety standards

Enhance communication, morale, and productivity (Cox and Vassie, 1998)

Decrease financial impact of safety (Cox and Vassie, 1998)

Hypotheses

attitude differs between SMSs adopters & non-adopters

H1: define safety and security goals and

communicate them to employees

H2: update risk data

H3: assess risks and define corrective actions

H4: implement employees training programs

Survey Phase

Sample and data collection

Questionnaire contents

Methodology

Survey Phase

Sample and data collectionChoose the companies randomly on www.kompass.com

Pre-test: e-mail (100)

Rewritten the questionnaire, and add explanations

Data collection: March to May 2007

Send by email: 400 companies

Response: 23.2% (116/500)

a = 0.838 (recommended value 0.6)

Survey Phase

Questionnaire contents4 sections

4-points Likert scale

SPSS

Survey Phase

Methodology (Minand Galle, 2001)

Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA)Verify the questions and double check

Reduce the factors to a limited number

Factors reliability: Cronbach’s a or Pearson correlation cofeeicient

Hypotheses testingindependent-samples T test

Multiple comparisons

Results

Respondents

Safety

managers

Quality

managers

Finance

managers

36% 16% 16%

Manufacturing Agriculture Building commercial

55% 14.7% 11.3% 6%

Results

Adopt SMS (more less)Industries: Building (66.67%) Agriculture Manufacturing Commercial

Company size: Big (58.33%) Medium (56.82%) Micro Small

No difference in product quality and competitive positionCurrent market share: adopters are higher

Adopters 65.52% v.s Non-adopters 39.66%

More accidents happened toNon-adopters (15.05)

Manufacturing (13.97) & Building(14.75)

Results

Confirmatory factor analysisEngenvectors >1Variance maximizing procedure is used to extract factors

Results

Hypotheses Testing

Results

Results

update risk data evidence for causal relationships between SMS implementation and improvements

SMS is used to systematically codify incidents, so facilitating the use of updating risk data

(Rowlinson, 2004)

Results

access risks and define corrective reactions

adopting SMS improves risk monitoring

SMS codify incidents and related causes, which helps companies to get useful information for improving the design and planning of safety measures, and for monitoring the result performance

Results

implement employees trainingstrongly supported by the results

Human resource: employees training and awareness

Conclusions

The difference between two groups is the key points—implementing SMS can get benefits, i.e. 4 factors

Companies adopting SMSs exhibit higher performance.

This study doesn’t provide a direction of causality of the results obtained.

Future research: investigate only one industry, causal relationship between SMS implementation and improvement, difference between IMS(Integrated) and SMS