Auditoría del clima y cultura de seguridad en la empresa

Résumé

Work accidents are more likely in Spain than in any other EC country. The minimum interest in psychosocial factors may well be an explanation for that. Only recently Spanish laws have considered psychosocial factors an important key in health and safety issues and empirical research on these topics are still seldom. The present research is a contribution along these lines. Safety culture plays a central role among the psychosocial factors affecting accidents occurrence. A number of studies and investigations on great disasters, such as those of Chernobyl or Alpha Piper, have pointed at safety culture problems as an intervening factor of maximum interest. As a result of these investigations, most developed countries have reinforced the research to obtain an operational definition of the concept, together with an instrument or instruments to measure it and allow for comparisons. It is also common to closely relate the concepts of safety climate and culture. Safety climate has had a better operative definition than culture, and it has been therefore used in most psychological models of accidents. At the same time, a recent report from the European Agency for Health and Safety (2000) has stressed the need for a methodological system to control safety at work within the EU. According to this report, there are three key points to assess: a) methodological issues; b) reliability of indicators; c) improvement of national reports. The doctoral dissertation aims to improve these lines: it presents a measurement model of safety climate; it offers a methodological context, it studies reliability and validity of safety climate indicators; and finally, it offers empirical evidence on the relationships among safety climate and health and safety outcomes.