The Role of Trust in Safety Culture

Abstract

Abstract Since the Piper Alpha disaster, the oil and gas industry has taken steps to develop a more positive safety culture. Safety climate surveys have been used to provide a snapshot of the state of safety by measuring the workforce's explicit attitudes and perceptions about safety at a point in time. Organisational theorists have argued that climate is only a surface manifestation of culture and that culture manifests itself in deeper levels of unconscious assumptions. Psychologists have shown that an individual is able to hold different evaluations of the same object (a conscious, explicit attitude and an unconscious, implicit attitude) and that an individual's explicit and implicit attitudes to something do not have to be the same. This paper investigates the explicit and implicit attitudes held by the workforce at a UK gas plant about the trustworthiness of their workmates, supervisors and the plant leadership. A short questionnaire was used to measure explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes were measured using a computerised task. The main finding was that a different pattern of results emerged for explicit and implicit attitudes about trust. The paper concludes by proposing a model of dual attitudes about trust in safety culture.