Use of Organizational Climate and Culture Measures in Risk Assessment

The author and his colleagues at the Naval Postgraduate School have developed a web-based survey system for assessing command climate and cultural factors of high-reliability organizations. The survey was designed to measure the extent to which a particular naval squadron met criteria of a so-called High Reliability Organization. Construction of the questionnaire was based primarily on the work of Karlene Roberts, from the Haas Business School, UC Berkeley, and her colleague Carolyn Libuser, from the University of California at Los Angeles. It was Roberts who coined the term high-reliability organization (HRO). Roberts and Libuser studied organizations in terms of their ability to effectively manage risks associated with possible accidents and material losses or financial failures. This online safety climate survey has been in use by the US Navy for about 5 years. The survey system enables naval commands to administer a safety climate survey to their unit personnel and to receive immediate diagnostic feedback of results. The web-based survey (http://www.safetyclimatesurveys.org/index1.asp.) provides aviation commanders with a means to administer the survey and to receive a statistical summary of results concerning key issues related to command climate, safety culture, workload, resource availability, estimated success of certain safety intervention programs, and other factors related to safely managing fleet flying operations.

A second-generation web survey system was recently completed for US Marine Corps Ground Forces. This survey (https://miras.dbidb.com/usmc/login.html) includes enhanced capabilities for survey taker verbal responses and provides normative statistical performance comparisons to peer organizations that share similar operational risks. The author, working as a consultant to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, also developed a third generation application of the web-based survey for civilian flight schools (https://survey.avsaf.org/login.html).

This presentation summarizes research that has been conducted over the past seven years to develop, validate and apply, safety climate measures in high-reliability organizations. The military aviation environment has afforded an opportunity to closely observe high-risk organizations, their management of flight safety, differences in safety cultures, and to assess the potential impact of such organizational factors on flight crew risk decisions and accident causation. The author also is working with civilian organizations in order to expand application of the web survey technology to other high-reliability organizations. For example, he is collaborating with a Stanford University/VA Hospital research team headed by Stanford University professor (Dr. David Gaba). The Stanford University research team uses an adapted version of the survey to examine safety climate and cultural factors and potential human error risk in medical delivery agencies. It is of particular interest to the long term goal of this study to understand the possible influence of such organizational factors as organizational climate and safety culture on individual and work team behavior, including risk perception, risk- taking, and the risk decision processes that may affect organizational performance effectiveness and safety.