Visualization and Interpretation of Resilient Safety Culture : Integrated Social Network Modeling

Safety culture is a widely accepted concept which can be used to analyze and explain the underlying logic of organizational behavior, especially how an organization works with respect to safety. The growing complexity and uncertainty in work environments continues to challenge this concept giving rise to a relatively new concept; the resilient safety culture (RSC). RSC emphasizes resilience, learning, continuous improvements, and readiness to respond through stable cognitive processes and variability in actions. This paper argues that RSC can be perceived as a network connecting different organizational capabilities namely, psychological, behavioral and managerial. Each capability is represented by a set of leading indicators. Using an organization as a case study where data were collected from employees operating on two different sites, the paper applies social network analysis (SNA) combined with ORA-LITE software to visualize and interpret the RSC network for each site. The paper also employs fault tree analysis (FTA) method to link the different network components in order to determine the relatively weak areas within the network that detract from the overall resilience