Implicit safety-critical attitudes within safety culture

Safety culture is a very relevant topic for high reliability organizations. In most models safety culture is defined as being basic assumptions, attitudes or values concerning organizational safety issues. When measuring safety cultures many researchers were primarily focussed on explicit safety-critical attitudes and generally relied on specific survey instruments. However, it is questionable whether self-report measures can capture all aspects of organizational safety culture. This article deals with the relationship between implicit safety-critical attitudes and safety culture. Based on an implicit social cognition approach and conceptual models of safety culture it is asked whether implicit safety-critical attitudes may be a better predictor for the various safety culture indicators compared to explicit attitudes. In this study explicit and implicit safety-critical attitudes of 70 participants working at a German production unit for gearbox manufacturing were measured. The author used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure implicit safety-critical attitudes. Questionnaires were used to assess explicit safety attitudes and various indicators of safety culture. The results of this study show that implicit safety-critical attitudes were superior in the prediction of safety culture indicators on an individual level. Moreover, recommendations for future research in the field of safety culture assessment are made.