Safety culture management: the importance of organizational factors

The concept of safety culture has been used extensively to explain the underlying causes of performance based events, both positive and negative, across the nuclear industry. Yet attempts to operationally define the concept of safety culture and assess it have been less apparent. The work described in this paper represents several years of effort to identify, define and assess the organizational factors important to safe performance in nuclear power plants (NPPs). The research discussed in this paper is primarily conducted in support of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) efforts in understanding the impact of organizational performance on safety. As a result of a series of research activities undertaken by numerous NRC contractors, a collection of organizational dimensions has been identified and defined. These dimensions represent what is believed to be a comprehensive taxonomy of organizational elements that relate to the safe operation of nuclear power plants. Techniques were also developed by which to measure these organizational dimensions, and include structured interview protocols, behavioral checklists, and behavioral anchored rating scales (BARS). Recent efforts have focussed on devising a methodology for the extraction of information related to the identified organizational dimensions from existing NRC documentation. This type of effort would assess the applicability of the organizational dimensions to existing NRC inspection and evaluation reports, refine the organizational dimensions previously developed so they are more relevant to the task of retrospective analysis , and attempt to rate plants based on the review of existing NRC documentation using the techniques previously developed for the assessment of organizational dimensions. (author)