Citation

Baird D. Pol. Pract. Health Saf. 2005; 3(1): 17-39.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005, Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (Great Britain))

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This paper describes a case study that focused on a fundamental question - will the intervention of an occupational safety and health management system in an organisation lead to enhanced health and safety performance? The paper discusses the core influences on the management system intervention at the case study site and describes the development and testing of an analytical model founded on previous quality management research.

The case study found that implementing a health and safety management system did not lead to an improvement in performance. A model, grounded in previous quality management research, was developed to identify the core and medium-level influencing factors acting on the intervention to produce the, perhaps unexpected, resultant output. The majority of these core and medium-level influencing factors can be labelled under the heading 'organisational/safety culture'. The case study demonstrates the high degree of mutual interaction and interdependence between organisational/safety culture and a health and safety management system intervention. The research built on and was anchored in previous research at the site.