Organizational safety is a contemporary discipline of study and research developed from the works of James Reason, creator of the Swiss cheese model, and Charles Perrow author of Normal Accidents.
Organizational culture is the established underlying suppositions (Ashkanasy, Broadfoot, & Falkus, 2000; Schein, 1991; Strauss, 1987) communicated through shared, collectively supported, perceptions (Schneider, Brief, & Guzzo, 1996) that ultimately manifest in organizational outputs (Ashkanasy et al., 2000; Schein, 1991; Strauss, 1987).
[4] The idea that too much reliance should not be placed on tool supported decision making was discussed by Robert Freeman in a 1980s article, "Taking the Bugs Out of Computer Spreadsheets".
In it, Freeman discusses a case of a Dallas-based oil gas company losing millions of dollars in the acquisition deal.
Safety culture can be defined as the product of individual and group attitudes, perceptions, and values about workplace behaviors and processes that collectively result safety work units and reliable organizational products (Cox & Flin, 1998; Flin et al., 2000; Hale, 2000; Williamson, Feyer, Cairns, & Biancotti, 1997; Zohar, 1980, 2003).
In essence, safety culture describes the organizational attributes that reflect safe work environments (Guldenmund, 2000).
This concept is deeply rooted in social systems where comprehensive analysis of errors exposed organizational (Reason, 1998), system (Perrow, 1984), process (Rasmussen, 1999) and human failures (Cook, Render, & Woods, 2000) responsible for most preventable adverse outcomes (Reason, 1990).