Does the management of regulatory compliance and occupational risk have an impact on safety culture

Companies try to improve risk management in the field of Occupational Health and Safety (OHS). In recent years this has translated into the introduction of safety management systems (SMS). These management tools bring together personnel, policies and resources aimed at improving the performance of a company in the area of OHS. SMS provide a structured, global framework for risk management based on compliance with existing repositories. An SMS consists of various stages or processes, notably concerned with the management of regulatory compliance and risk analysis. Various tools are deployed in order to meet these SMS requirements. At the same time, the concept of safety culture has progressively taken hold in organizations. The idea has numerous benefits and can contribute to a reduction in occupational accidents and illness. However, these benefits are presented as self-evident facts which have not really been tested and proven. It is therefore appropriate to study the nature and strength of relationships between safety culture and two explanatory variables; namely compliance management and risk assessment. In other words, it is necessary to assess the respective contributions of these two variables to the creation, deployment and running of safety culture within a company. This paper is organized into three parts. The first part describes the definition of safety culture and looks at its various components as described in the literature. The second part presents ways to model the processes of regulatory compliance, risk assessment and safety climate and provides a further, descriptive model that uses common variables to identify the relationships between these three components in terms of nature and degree. Finally, the third section details the results of an experiment carried out in a company. The experiment demonstrates the deployment of models to evaluate the interactions between components, and its results are discussed and analysed.