Print Email Facebook Twitter ‘Ladder’-based safety culture assessments inversely predict safety outcomes Title ‘Ladder’-based safety culture assessments inversely predict safety outcomes Author Boskeljon-Horst, L. (Royal Netherlands Air Force Headquarters) Sillem, S. (TU Delft Values Technology and Innovation) Dekker, S.W.A. (Griffith University) Department Values Technology and Innovation Date 2022 Abstract There is little empirical evidence on the predictive value of safety culture assessments (SCAs) in relation to how accident-prone an organisation might be. Recently, Antonsen not just demonstrated how a quantitative SCA mispredicted future safety outcomes, but actually showed an inverse relationship between the assessment and subsequent critical incident investigation findings. To add to our understanding, this article presents research on whether a SCA has a predictive capacity for safety outcomes. Like in Antonsen's research, an opportunity emerged when a helicopter taxiing accident, resulting in a rotor strike occurred for a helicopter squadron that had just undergone a SCA. The assessment used ‘culture ladder’ rubrics for its findings, which allowed us to look for specific features in the subsequent independent accident investigation (in which the researchers were not involved). As with Antonsen's findings, our research shows that a ‘ladder’-based assessment has little predictive value. Any predictive value it has is in the inverse of the assessment findings. For instance, where the SCA showed that the safety culture was very mature regarding finding a balance between safety and the mission at hand or the breaking of rules, the accident investigation pointed these out as the causes of the accident. Subject predictive valuesafetysafety culture assessmentsafety culture laddersafety outcome To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:2ad4a243-4824-4d43-98b4-9a55dc672c85 DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-5973.12445 Embargo date 2023-07-01 ISSN 0966-0879 Source Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 31 (3), 372-391 Bibliographical note Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public. Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights © 2022 L. Boskeljon-Horst, S. Sillem, S.W.A. Dekker Files PDF Contingencies_Crisis_Mgmt ... safety.pdf 1.45 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:2ad4a243-4824-4d43-98b4-9a55dc672c85/datastream/OBJ/view