Organizational and Individual Safety Factors in Work on Chemical Tanker Vessels

Abstract

Chemical tanker vessels are at risk for large-scale accidents due to the nature of their cargo and operating conditions, challenging environments as well as general maritime hazards. To counteract such hazards, the ship-owning company works on maintaining safety at the organizational level, and the captain instantiates safety regulations on the interpersonal level. The crew members are expected to maintain safety by having accurate situation awareness, and beneficial safety attitudes and behaviour. We pre-registered an analysis to test for associations between safety variables in a survey for chemical tanker vessel crews. A structural equation model revealed that the ship-owning company’s safety climate and the captain’s leadership style were associated with the vessel’s safety climate. Further, the vessel’s safety climate was associated with individual safety attitude, situation awareness and adherence to safety management systems. Safety attitude had a central role in the model and was associated with situation awareness, reporting attitude, safe behaviour and adherence to safety management systems. The results imply that it may be beneficial to monitor and improve safety attitudes among crew on chemical tanker vessels and in similar work-environments.

Can Survey Measures Predict Subsequent Key Performance Indicators of Maritime Safety? Confirmatory and Exploratory Analyses of the Association between Self - report and Objective Indices

“…A previous analysis of self-reported variables in the current dataset (Hjellvik et al, 2019) has shown that organizational factors and safety attitudes predict safety behaviour. The self-reported statements about attitudes, cognition and safety policies were used as indicators for the crew's self-reported safety behaviour.…”

“…However, all self-report measures have limitations that bias the results and limit the conclusions and causal inferences. The object of the current study is therefore to investigate if factors previously identified as safety critical (see Hjellvik, Aga, & Saetrevik, 2019) have an impact on behaviour categorized as unwanted or dangerous in the same population where data were collected.…”

“…Cox and Cox (1991) found that safety attitudes were determined by evaluations and beliefs related to arrangements for safety, such as rules and procedures, scepticism and responsibility and risk. The relationship between attitudes and behaviour is welldocumented (Donald & Canter, 1994;Rundmo & Hale, 2003), and attitude to safety has been indicated to be a relevant mediator in a causal chain of safety critical factors in survey research (Hjellvik et al, 2019). This indicates that the crew's thoughts and beliefs about risks and organizational structures impact their self-reported work performance.…”

“…It would thus be resource extensive and unrealistic to measure the SA of all crew members across all their tasks. Previous studies have developed and supported an approach measuring the selfreported experience of SA across work settings (Hjellvik et al, 2019;Saetrevik, 2013;Saetrevik & Hystad, 2017, 2019. Measuring the crew's SA, as well as other safety factors "in the field" aboard CTVs provides information about the safety level aboard the vessels and the anticipated products of the crew's self-reported cognitive states and performance.…”

“…Self-report of safe or unsafe behaviour is often used as a proxy for actual behaviour (e.g. Hjellvik et al, 2019;Naevestad et al, 2019;Sneddon, Mearns, & Flin, 2013;Saetrevik & Hystad, 2017, 2019. The current study used self-report to measure the personal and collective safety responsibilities of the crew working on CTVs.…”