The safety climate, hierarchical levels and resilience assessment in transport and mining companies

Abstract

ABSTRACT Transport and mining companies are vulnerable to a variety of hazards, and this paper offers a novel conceptual framework for organisational resilience assessment at different organisational levels. It is based on a safety climate and performances assessment in companies in the transport and mining sector. The framework contains factor and reliability analysis and continues by applying the SMART method from the perspective of resilience corners: anticipate, monitor, react and learn. The highest resilience coefficients at all organisational levels are obtained regarding safety awareness, safety training and safety communication areas, while the lowest values are observed for risk assessment and the organisational environment. The obtained results indicate that the ‘monitor’ resilience corner must be improved at all organisational levels, employees trained and procedures changed, since employees do not sufficiently use experience from previous events. The very high values at all organisational levels of the coefficients regarding the ‘anticipate’ and ‘learn’ resilience corners indicate organisational adaptation to changes through corrective activities, rather than planned preventive ones. All hierarchical levels have good resilience indicators, except for middle management, which expressed an adequate resilience index, due to the lower ratings of the safety training, organisational commitment, risk assessment and management support areas.