Assignment Task
A safety culture within an organisation is generally considered to be a set of beliefs, norms, attitudes, or practices that reduce the exposure of all people in and around an organisation towards conditions considered dangerous or hazardous (CASA, 2016). According to Reason (1997) there are five components of a safety culture: Informed, Just, Flexible, Learning and Reporting and it is a reporting culture that is key to developing a strong safety culture. McCune, Lewis and Arendt (2011) cautioned that if safety reports were used as a source of information for disciplinary action the reporting system would likely suffer, and employees would quickly lose trust in their organisation’s safety culture. Therefore, Patankar et al. (2012, cited in McMurtrie & Molesworth, 2018) suggested that a just culture must exist to establish and sustain an effective reporting culture for an organisation to gain an understanding of errors and hazards in the operational environment. A just culture is a culture of trust and learning while it also holds people in an organisation accountable for undesirable performance (Dekker, 2017). Dekker (2017) added that the primary purpose of a just culture is to give people the confidence to report safety issues.
It is assumed that you are a new safety manager for UniSA Aviation, and you have been tasked to produce a report that details the inter-dependency and the importance of reporting and just cultures within the company’s safety culture with a case study.
