114 S.J. Cox, A.J.T.

Cheyne / Safety Science 34 (2000) 111±129

now seen to be an important area of concern with managers, regulators and

researchers. It has also been argued by researchers into o€shore health and safety
management practices that the safety culture concept has the potential to provide an
umbrella for both individual and organisational safety issues (Cox and Flin, 1998)
and can be used as a vehicle for framing further improvements. However, although
there is indeed some evidence to suggest that assessing the prevailing organisational
culture can assist in the identi®cation and management of health and safety issues
(Cox and Flin, 1998), the practical utility of the safety culture concept in securing
safety-related improvements in o€shore environments has not yet been established
(Lee, 1995).

1.2. The current studies

The present studies are concerned with the development and testing of an assess-
ment technique which provides both a practical tool for the assessment of safety
climate and simultaneously aids the promotion of a `positive' safety culture. The
studies described here are published in the ``Safety Climate Assessment Toolkit''
(Cox and Cheyne, 1999) together with a guide for those using the toolkit. In view of
the practical intentions of the studies and the nature of the output, potential toolkit
users in participating organisations were widely consulted in the development of the
conceptual framework. This framework has been described in a number of previous
publications (e.g. Cheyne et al., 1988; Cox et al., 1998; Cox and Cheyne, 1999) and
involves a holistic view of safety climate assessment. Assessments of safety climate
are used here as an indicator of overall safety culture. Culture in general, and safety
culture in particular, is often characterised as an enduring aspect of the organisation
with trait-like properties and not easily changed. Climate, on the other hand, can be
conceived of as a manifestation of organisational culture (Schein, 1985) exhibiting
more state-like properties. The nature of culture and climate and their relationship
has also been related to the concepts of personality and mood (Cox and Flin, 1998),
where culture represents the more trait-like properties of personality and climate the
more state-like properties of mood. For the purposes of this discussion climate is
viewed as a temporal manifestation of culture, which is re¯ected in the shared per-
ceptions of the organisation at a discrete point in time (Cox and Cheyne, 1999).
A multiple perspective, or holistic, model of the safety climate assessment process
was proposed and, as such, dominated the project design. Similar approaches are
discussed within the literature in relation to the assessment of organisational climate
(James and Jones, 1974; Cox and Cox, 1996; Denison, 1996). It has been suggested
(Jick, 1979) that organisational researchers and practitioners can improve the accu-
racy of their judgements by both utilising multiple methods and collecting di€erent
kinds of data bearing on the same phenomenon, in this case safety climate. `Between
(or across) methods' triangulation (Denzin, 1978) o€ers such an approach. Jick
(1979) cites the example of reviewing the e€ectiveness of an organisational `leader',
where e€ectiveness may be studied by: (1) interviewing the leader; (2) observing their
leadership behaviours; and (3) evaluating performance records. The focus remains
with the organisational issue (in Jick's, 1979 example `leadership') but the mode of