Measuring Organizational Safety and Effectiveness at NASA

Abstract

:Many project managers may be fully aware of the safety risks within their organizations. What they may not know, however, is that many of these risks are caused by the underlying safety culture of the organization rather than human individual differences in the organization. This article argues that managers can mitigate safety risks by obtaining a better understanding of their organizations' culture. The researchers created a management metric that enables engineering/project managers to identify positive and negative aspects of safety that are tied to their organizations' cultures. The article presents a process that managers can use to increase safety and effectiveness in their organizations based on a case study in which the researchers made preparations to employ the metric at NASA.