Safety Science 57 (2013) 326334

Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Safety Science
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ssci

From the surface to the underlying meaning-an analysis of senior managers

safety culture perceptions
L.S. Fruhen a,, K.J. Mearns a,1, R.H. Flin a, B. Kirwan b
a
b

University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom

EUROCONTROL, Paris, France

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 28 September 2011
Received in revised form 3 December 2012
Accepted 7 March 2013
Available online 15 April 2013
Keywords:
Safety culture
Senior managers
Content
Artefacts
Leximancer

a b s t r a c t
Senior managers can inuence safety culture and it is therefore important to understand how they think
about this aspect of their organisation. Examining senior managers interpretations of safety culture (via
content and artefacts like language), is one way to address this issue. Safety culture descriptions obtained
through interviews with senior managers (N = 8) from two air trafc management organisations in
Europe were subjected to content analysis based on Reasons (1997) safety culture model and linguistic
analysis (using Leximancer). The content analysis indicated just culture as a dominant theme in senior
managers thinking about safety culture. Close links between the linguistic themes people and safety
were found in both organisations. Senior managers from Organisation 1 viewed management as crucial
for safety culture and the linguistic analysis suggested atter hierarchies and communication might facilitate their approach. Organisation 2 was characterised by a focus on reporting culture, performance,
data and accountability. The ndings of the two complementary methods of analysis illustrated how
the conscious, as well as the subconscious, levels of understanding safety culture might be related. Organisations may benet from an investigation of their leaders safety culture views through linguistic analysis, in addition to questionnaires and other measures.
2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
Reviews of the safety climate literature by Flin et al. (2000) and
Guldenmund (2007) identify management and their attitudes and
behaviours as a key safety climate factor. Furthermore, two metaanalyses (Beus et al., 2010; Christian et al., 2009) found management commitment to be one of the most inuential safety climate
factors in relation to safety behaviours and injury rates in organisations. Industries and regulators in domains such as oil and gas,
aviation, railways, and the maritime sector have recognised the
importance of senior managers for safety. The present research is
set in a highly reliable industry, air trafc management (ATM)
which delivers the management of air trafc to most users of the
airspace. Their services contribute to the excellent safety record
of aviation (UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), accessed August
2009). It should be noted that ATM activities concern operational
and organisational safety, rather than occupational, or personal

Corresponding author. Address: School of Psychology, Kings College, Old

Aberdeen AB24 2UB, United Kingdom. Tel.: +44 1224 273210; fax: +44 1224
273426.
E-mail address: l.fruhen@abdn.ac.uk (L.S. Fruhen).
1
Present address: Human Factors Specialist Inspector at the Energy Division,
Hazardous Installations Directorate, Health and Safety Executive, Lord Cullen House,
Fraser Place, Aberdeen, AB25 3UB, United Kingdom.
0925-7535/$ - see front matter 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2013.03.006

safety, because air trafc controllers workplaces are not inherently

dangerous. Rather, air trafc controllers manage the risks to which
others are exposed and their work can involve trade-off decisions
between efciency of trafc throughput and safety. Despite its
excellent safety record, European ATM suffered a major accident
(mid-air collision) near Ueberlingen in 2002. The investigation of
this accident also highlights the inuential role of senior managers
in achieving safe ATM operations: [. . .], managers can change and
improve existing corporate culture by establishing safety recognisable for all staff members as high priority. Feedback and continual reinforcement from the most senior management down will
help develop dedication and accountability that is desirable.
(p. 90, German Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Investigation,
2004).
Although identied as highly relevant for organisational safety,
the mechanisms of senior managers inuence on safety are not
fully understood (Flin et al., 2000). It has been argued that communication about safety, especially regarding safety values, is an
important way for senior managers to convey their safety commitment (e.g. Neal and Grifn, 2004; Hopkins, 2011; HSE, 2007). The
aim of this study is to investigate how senior managers from two
different ATM organisations think about their organisations safety
culture. It is proposed that this groups thinking about safety culture will be reected in the content, as well as the language, which
they use to describe this attribute of their organisation.

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327

1.1. Investigating perspectives on organisational safety culture not

climate

and as more likely to capture the climate of organisations (Flin

et al., 2000; Guldenmund, 2007). Furthermore, Reichers and
Schneider (1990) describe the mere reliance on surveys as an
insufcient source of information about the inner workings of
an organisation (p. 27). This suggests an investigation into the
deeper, often unconscious aspect of organisational culture might
require research methods that more directly relate to such inner
workings.
Schein (2004) suggests a focus on cultural artefacts as suitable
for gaining access to the deeper levels of culture. Nevertheless,
the qualitative empirical insights based on cultural artefacts are
still rather limited, as they generally pose higher constraints in
terms of the time required to collect and analyse the data and a
limited suitability for publication (Reichers and Schneider,
1990). The aim of this study is to investigate the ways in which
senior managers describe safety culture by accounting for the
two levels of culture: the content on the surface, as well as the
underlying meaning. Language was evaluated as a suitable access
point to the underlying meaning of culture, as it has been proposed by Schein (2004) as an artefact of culture. It can be proposed that linguistic analysis, in addition to content analysis,
might identify issues that are beyond the senior managers
espoused beliefs.

The concepts of culture and climate are acknowledged in the

organisational literature as having a considerable overlap, yet the
distinction between the two concepts is described as relevant for
a thorough understanding of the sense making that takes place
in organisations. Generally, the distinction between the concepts
is rooted in how deeply they reside within organisations. Reichers
and Schneider (1990) suggest that culture is a set of meanings that
is rooted in the deeper consciousness of organisations, whereas
they view climate as a manifestation of culture that provides a
snapshot of the underlying assumptions which form a culture.
Similar to the general climate and culture literature, the safety specic literature emphasises this distinction between safety culture
and safety climate, however the terms are often used interchangeably (Guldenmund, 2000). Safety culture is conceptualized by Cox
and Flin (1998) as a meaning system which indicates to the workforce what is important and legitimate for their actions in relation
to safety culture. In his development of the safety climate concept,
Zohar (1980) describes climate as sets of organizational perceptions that are shared and summarized by the organisations members. Like the relation between general culture and climate, safety
culture is described as manifesting itself through organisational
climate (Guldenmund, 2000). Both concepts, safety culture and
safety climate, are acknowledged as key predictors of organisational safety outcomes. Prior research indicates that well established safety climates and cultures are related to better safety
performance indicated by criterion measures such as occupational
accidents, safety compliance, injuries, or safety participation (e.g.
Clarke, 2006), higher safety motivation (Neal and Grifn, 2006;
Grifn and Neal, 2000) and lower underreporting rates of injuries
(Probst et al., 2008).
Although safety culture and safety climate are described in the
literature as qualitatively different, this is not necessarily reected
in the way they are assessed. The unconscious or underlying aspects are crucial for our understanding of organisational culture
(e.g. Rousseau, 1990) and for its distinction from the concept of climate (e.g. Schein, 2004). Because culture focuses on the deepest,
often unconscious part of a group (Schein, 2004, p. 14), it is described as less tangible than other aspects of organisations, suggesting it is difcult to access and to measure. The safety culture
literature acknowledges that the majority of studies rely on questionnaires (Guldenmund, 2007). This approach is described as not
providing sufcient access to underlying aspects of safety culture

1.1.1. Language and culture

According to Scheins model of organisational culture (2004),
artefacts are the visible aspects of an organisation such as its technology and products, its language, myths and stories. These are described as manifestations of espoused beliefs and values as well as
unconscious assumptions of the members of an organisation. Popping (2000) denes language as symbolic behaviour which transmits values, norms and meaning. It should be noted that
language is not only proposed as facilitating the understanding of
culture, it is also described as promoting the development of cultural rules for perceiving, believing and acting in organisations
(Ouchi and Wilkins, 1985).
Accordingly, language is suggested to be not only an artefact of
culture, but also as a tool through which culture can be inuenced. In line with this, we focus our investigation on the language
of a group who are described as critical for the development of
safety culture. The role of language has been highlighted as especially suitable for the study of leadership by Pondy (1978) who
suggests leadership is a language game. He describes the leaders
success in this game as depending on the extent to which he or
she is able to give meaning and identity to an organisation by creating words that promote sense making of collective experiences.
Accordingly, senior managers can be viewed as sense-makers of
safety culture.
More recently, the safety culture literature has begun to explore possible ways of investigating artefacts of culture. To our
knowledge, only one study exists in the safety culture literature
that explicitly studies a particular safety culture artefact: Luria
and Rafaeli (2008) study safety signs as an artefact suitable to
gain access to underlying assumptions and found that employees
interpreted these signs with a deeper meaning rather than their
functional meaning, i.e. a wear your safety gear sign was evaluated by workers as indicating an interest of the management in
worker safety in general rather than the management using the
sign as purely a function to increase worker compliance with
safety equipment. Additionally, a study by Colley and Neal
(2012) has investigated safety schema of different individuals in
organisations (workers, supervisors and managers) through linguistic analysis. However, it should be noted that their study
was not directly concerned with safety culture and language as
an artefact of organisational culture, but rather organisational
safety more generally.

Because senior managers have been identied as crucially inuencing organisational safety, understanding their way of thinking
and communicating about safety culture is highly relevant. Schein
(2004) describes leaders as exerting a powerful inuence on organisational culture and suggested that what they value as important
is what they systematically pay attention to (p. 246). The way senior managers describe safety culture is likely to give an indication
of not only the way they think about safety culture, but also of the
issues they focus on when they attempt to shape their organisations safety culture (Schein, 2004) from their inuential positions.
This inuence is likely to be exerted at a conscious level, reected
in the content of senior managers statements when talking about
safety culture. Furthermore, as culture is described as a largely
unconscious organisational attribute, it can be proposed that a
more complete understanding of the ways in which senior managers conceptualise safety culture can be achieved by considering
underlying aspects of their descriptions. Consideration of the
unconscious levels of culture may be one approach to distinguishing deeper features of the culture from the surface aspects of
organisational climate (Reichers and Schneider, 1990).

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L.S. Fruhen et al. / Safety Science 57 (2013) 326334

Reasons (1997) safety culture model was chosen as the theoretical conceptualisation of safety culture for the present study. He
proposed that safety culture in organisations consists of the following elements:
 Informed culture: the organisation has a safety information system that collects, analyses and disseminates information from
incidents and near misses, as well as from regular proactive
checks on the system.
 Reporting culture: organisational members are prepared to
report their errors, mistakes and near-misses.
 Just culture: an atmosphere of trust where people are encouraged and even rewarded to provide essential safety-related
information, but also in which it is clear where the line between
acceptable and unacceptable behaviour is drawn.
 Flexible culture: adaptability in terms of an ability to recongure the organisational structure in the face of a dynamic and
demanding task environment.
 Learning culture: the willingness and competence to draw the
right conclusions from safety system, and the willingness to
implement reform when required.
This safety culture model is described as considering the psychological, behavioural and situational aspects of safety culture
(Cooper, 2000). Reason proposes that these elements of safety culture drive safety improvements in organisations. The model has
been applied in previous research as a framework for investigating
safety culture (e.g. Parker et al., 2006) and is well accepted. The
present study explored whether senior managers refer to these elements when describing safety culture and examined the language
they use when describing this aspects of their organisation. Their
statements are interpreted as providing insights into their way of
thinking about safety culture, reecting their underlying attitudes
which inform their actions in relation to safety. This was investigated by comparing safety culture descriptions of senior managers
from two ATM organisations.
2. Method
2.1. Sample
The sample consisted of senior managers (N = 8, response
rate = 81%) from two European Air Navigation Service Providers
(ANSPs). Participants were in the positions of chief executive ofcer (n = 2), chief operating ofcer (n = 3), director of safety (n = 2)
and director of air navigation services (n = 1), with all being members of the executive teams of their organisations. Average time in
position of participants was 29.4 months (SD = 17.5, range 11
66 months). Participants had a variety of backgrounds including
experience in military, ATM, the energy industry and transportation, and seven held degrees in business, engineering or human
factors.
2.2. Procedures
Individual interviews were carried out on site by two interviewers who were psychologists. As part of a semi structured interview
schedule, the responses analysed in this study relate to two questions: What are the main ingredients (or components) of the safety
culture of your ANSP? What would you do to improve the safety culture of your ANSP? These questions were asked, to ensure participants would not only talk about the positive aspects of their
organisations safety culture, but also about aspects they evaluate
as improvable. By doing so, we endeavoured to obtain a more complete description of safety culture perceptions from participants.
Participants responses were transcribed verbatim.

2.3. Analysis
Two types of analysis were used: content analysis and linguistic
analysis. Content analysis was carried out deductively following
the guidelines by Mayring (2000). Accordingly, responses were
allocated into Reasons safety culture elements whenever possible
and the remaining responses were considered as reecting additional aspects of safety culture that are not included in the original
model. Two independent raters were provided with explicit denitions and coding rules in a coding scheme (Dey, 1993). Interrater
reliability of the coding was tested with Krippendorffs alpha, using
a PSAW-matrix by Hayes and Krippendorff (2007) and achieved a
sufcient interrater agreement of a = 0.81 (95% CI 0.690.90).
These practices ensured that condent conclusions could be drawn
from the material (Armstrong et al., 1997).
The linguistic analysis of the transcripts was carried out using
the text analysis tool Leximancer (Smith, 2003; Smith and
Humphreys, 2006). Previously, Travaglia et al. (2009) applied Leximancer in a safetycritical profession (health care), to analyse
differences between perceptions of an incident reporting system
from doctors, nurses and allied health professionals. More
recently, Colley and Neal (2012) applied Leximancer to compare
the safety schema of workers, supervisors and management.
Leximancer carries out a corpus analysis of a given set of information by identifying the main concepts in a text corpus (semantic extraction) and how these relate to each other (relational
extraction). Leximancer conducts its analysis in three steps: First,
it identies frequently occurring concepts. These are weighted
term classiers developed through an iterative process in which
the program applies Bayesian principles. Second, Leximancer
analyses the concepts co-occurrence using a Bayesian approach.
This results in an asymmetric co-occurrence matrix. In the nal
step of the analysis, the program derives themes by allocating
concepts around a highly connected concept in each area. The
concept with the highest connectivity in each of these themes
names the theme as a parent concept. Analysing the data using
the Leximancer software has the following advantages over more
traditional thematic analysis: The program analyses the data
unsupervised, therefore provides results which do not suffer from
subjectivity and is described as reliable (Smith and Humphreys,
2006). Furthermore, the outputs obtained not only indicate the
frequency of the emerging concepts, but also groups them into
themes and indicates their connectivity.
In line with guidance in the Leximancer manual (2010), concepts that emerged during the analysis that had little semantic
meaning were excluded from the analysis (at stage 1 of the analysis). First, utterances such as ahem, and ah were removed from
the concept seed list, as these are lling sounds that do not convey
relevant meaning for the type of analysis carried out. Secondly, all
themes contents were inspected to evaluate to what extent they
conveyed relevant meaning by looking through the text excerpts
that Leximancer has identied as reecting these themes. According to this procedure, the concept seed things and means were
excluded from the analysis. The excerpts subsumed under these
themes indicated that the terms were used interchangeably by
participants to describe several issues. Therefore, their inclusion
was evaluated as likely to overshadow the actual meaning conveyed in these excerpts.
3. Results
3.1. Findings from the content analysis
The frequency with which Reasons safety culture components
were referred to in the responses from senior managers is viewed
as reecting their relevance and salience in this groups thinking

L.S. Fruhen et al. / Safety Science 57 (2013) 326334

found in responses of senior managers from Organisation 1

(f = 8). The following quote reects the importance of management
sincerity when it comes to safety and acknowledge the impact of
their own actions on organisational members: On the units they
feel that management actually mean that safety is important, that
they dont just say it. The next quote highlights this aspect further
and transmits a sense of responsibility: And I myself, I am, this is
something I have brought with me, in my different jobs. If you dont
practise, what you say and what you have in nice policies, you cant
expect that employees are doing actually what they are told to do
and what the procedures say.
For Organisation 2, a focus on reporting culture was identied
(f = 11), which was not as frequently referred to by senior managers from Organisation 1 (f = 2). In the following quote from Organisation2, the importance of learning from errors through reporting
is emphasised we do expect normal human beings to make mistakes
and it is only through reporting them that we can learn and improve
and the role of an open culture to promote such reporting is highlighted in the following I think it is very open so kind of open culture
in terms of open reporting.

Table 1
Results of content analysis.
Theme

Organisation 1

Organisation 2

Overall

2
11
12
1
1
2

4
13
21
4
3
10

Frequency
Informed culture
Reporting culture
Just culture
Flexible culture
Learning culture
Management/ Leadership

2
2
9
3
2
8

329

about safety culture (based on Namey et al., 2007). Table 1 shows

that the content identied by both coders as meaningful in the responses addressed all ve dimensions from Reasons safety culture
model. Across the two organisations, the cultural aspect of just
culture (f = 21) was most frequently identied, followed by
reporting culture (f = 13). Overall, the aspects informed culture
(f = 4), exible culture (f = 4) and learning culture (f = 3) were
not indicated frequently in the content of senior managers responses from the two organisations. Additionally to Reasons safety
culture dimensions, the coders identied content that reected aspects of management or leadership in the responses, with a relatively high frequency (f = 10).
Content referring to just culture was identied with a similar
frequency in the responses from both organisations. These responses reected aspects of trust, as well as a distinction between
acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. An example response from
Organisation 1 emphasises the role of the managers themselves in
creating that culture of trust: I think it is possibly one of the most
important functions that I have that they can trust me that they can
tell me something. Whereas the following example response from
Organisation 2 highlights the trust that the management displays
towards the members of the organisation: We have a belief that
our people know the answers. It is a key belief. And it is encouraging
them to unlock that information those ideas in order to make progress. The distinction between acceptable and unacceptable
behaviour as an element of a just culture is directly described in
this quote from Organisation 1: An organisational culture that is
very clear about what is accepted behaviour and what is not accepted
behaviour has inuenced everybody, so everybody respects this now.
A senior manager from Organisation 2 described this issue through
the phrase of drawing a line: People who are either negligent, or
unprofessional, where it is not that they have made a mistake. It is
where we make sure that people are clear about where that line is.
Next to this common focus on just culture in the responses
from the two organisations, the content analysis also revealed differences between the two groups of senior managers. Content
identied as management or leadership was predominantly

3.2. Findings from the linguistic analysis

Table 2 gives an overview of the themes identied through the
linguistic analysis with Leximancer and indicates what concepts
were grouped under each of these themes. Additionally, Fig. 1
shows the distribution of the themes on the conceptual maps, illustrating their connectivity. In these graphs, the arrangement of the
concepts and themes (their proximity to each other) shows their
relatedness in the language used by managers to describe safety
culture. The Leximancer program applies an algorithm, which is
based on a variant of the spring force model, to simulate forces between concepts in order to develop the concept maps (Smith and
Humphreys, 2006). The most central theme on the concept map
is the theme with the highest connectivity in each of the management teams descriptions of safety culture. Themes that are close to
each other will have a higher number of mutual connections than
themes that are more distant to each other. The size of each theme
reects the number of concepts grouped under its umbrella. The
results of this analysis further mark similarities in the safety culture descriptions provided by senior managers from the two organisations. The program identied safety and people as subsumed
under common themes in the descriptions from both organisations, suggesting that these two concepts were viewed as related
or connected by the senior managers.
The linguistic analysis further revealed more subtle differences
in the senior managers approaches towards safety culture. First,
this applied to the topographical form of the themes and concepts

Table 2
Themes and concepts identied through linguistic analysis.
Organisation 1

Organisation 2

Themes

Connectivity
(%)

Concepts

Themes

Connectivity
(%)

Concepts

Safety

100

Safety, culture, people, talk

People

100

Management, important,
started, top
Discussions, directly,
controllers, issues
Units, competence
Organisation, wanted, whole
Use
Time
Results
Build

Culture

19

People, safety, accountability, business, take, sure, clear, organisation,

work understand
Culture, reporting, level

Management

51

Operational

38

Units
Organisation
Use
Time
Results
Build

10
7
4
4
3
2

Performance

Improvement, performance, deal

Data
Capability
Leadership
Leaders

5
2
2
2

Data, controller, improve

Capability
Leadership
Leaders, environment

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L.S. Fruhen et al. / Safety Science 57 (2013) 326334

that were identied. Generally, the concept map of descriptions

from Organisation 1 was more diverse, as it involved more themes
(number of themes Organisation 1 = 9, number of themes organisation 2 = 7), and concepts were more spread across the themes,
whereas the concepts identied for Organisation 2 were mainly
grouped under the theme: people (see Fig. 1 and Table 2). Furthermore, the concept map of Organisation 1 showed the theme safety
as the most central theme, whereas in Organisation 2, the theme
people was indicated as the centre of the safety culture map.
Secondly, the language used to describe safety culture pointed
to subtle differences between the two groups of senior managers.
Senior managers from Organisation 1 seemed to refer frequently
to communication in their responses, as talk and discussion
emerged as concepts. Especially the concept discussion points to
the role of communication as creating atter hierarchies in this
organisation, as it is grouped under the theme operational, together with the concepts controllers (the frontline workforce in
ATM) and directly. The quotes that Leximancer identied as
reecting these concepts under the theme safety further emphasise the aim of being inclusive: we have an open organisational culture that is very inclusive and achieving involvement in safety
culture activities We are trying to establish yearly meetings with
all the chief air trafc controllers now, for two days, where we have
safety discussions on standardisation, and also stafng and safety issues from the safety staff.
As in the content analysis, management emerged as a theme
from the linguistic analysis of responses from Organisation 1.
Quotes identied by Leximancer as related to management suggest that this is both viewed from the perspective of the workforce
You have to be very serious and you have to respect the top management decisions, but also the role of management itself as inuencing safety through exemplary behaviour: We have come a long way
with this management attitude, management being an example.
Maybe this is the most important issue.
Finally, the linguistic analysis of responses from Organisation 1
indicated time as a theme. Two aspects can be highlighted based
on the content of this theme. First, the theme time is indicated as
related to the theme management, as the quotes suggest time as
a tool through which management can indicate what they value
as important: And I try to be visiting all the units once a year, without
any real agenda. Secondly, time is also described as a constraint for
safety in the organisation: And the idea was that they were going
back to their units and pass it [safety culture messages] on. But we know
that this only works on units, where the bosses have the possibility time
wise, because a lot of them work operationally since it is so small units
and [it depends on] competence and interest and priority to do it.
For Organisation 2, the majority of concepts were grouped under the theme people. This group of concepts included people,
safety, accountability, business, take, sure, clear, organisation, work, understand. First, this illustrates the close links that
this management team might perceive between safety and business. The ways in which business (i.e. money, productivity) and
safety might be connected in an industry like ATM is addressed
in the following quote identied by Leximancer under the theme
people: Very open, very proactive in safety on a tactical point of
view, but also on a planning point of view. I think, you know, people,
or in this kind of industry, people will always challenge whether we
are spending enough on safety. Furthermore, the quotes related to
this theme highlight that accountability was a frequently mentioned concept in relation to safety culture by the senior managers
from this organisation. This concept can be suggested as related to
the issue of a just culture as described by Reason, where acceptable
and unacceptable behaviour is clearly recognised and is illustrated
in the following quote: People have woken up to the fact that there
is a consequence to not really understanding and taking your safety
accountability seriously.

The concepts and themes identied in the language of senior

managers from Organisation 2 further show this management
teams focus on reporting culture (as in the content analysis) as
the concept reporting emerged as directly related to the theme
culture. In line with this, the linguistic analysis highlights that this
senior management team seems to think of safety culture as being
driven by data which also emerged as a theme.
Additional themes suggest that this senior management team
views safety culture as an issue that is related to performance
and that it is determined by an emphasis on capability. Leximancer identied the concept improvement as related to the theme of
performance which may suggest a proactive orientation towards
positive performance achievements. The following quote further
illustrate this point and highlights that performance is approached
positively: I mean I can see in my business, that rather than the
safety performances being a negative thing [. . .] people see it now as
a sense of pride.
4. Discussion
This study set out to investigate senior managers descriptions
of safety culture, as a proxy of the way this group thinks about this
organisational attribute at two levels: the content and the language. Safety culture is described in the literature as a construct
that individuals are exposed to on a conscious, as well as a subconscious level. This study attempted to gain access to the surface (i.e.
the content) and the underlying meaning (i.e. language as an artefact) of this construct. Furthermore, top managers are thought to
exert a crucial inuence on organisational culture through what
they pay attention to (Schein, 2004). Accordingly, an analysis
involving senior managers reveals the ways in which they think
about safety culture and can illustrate what underlying meanings
they associate with it. The analysis in this study involved senior
managers from two organisations, allowing an identication of
the common features and the differences, between their responses,
discussed in turn below.
4.1. Common themes across the two organisations
Across the senior managers from the two organisations, the
content mostly reected the aspect just culture from Reasons
(1997) safety culture model. It can be suggested that this dimension differs from the other four safety culture aspects of Reasons
model through its explicit consideration of people and trust. It
should be noted that the second most frequently mentioned aspect, reporting culture, shares some of these features (which
was more frequently identied in Organisation 2). The other three
safety culture dimensions subside more in the technological conguration (informed culture, learning culture) or the structure of
the organisation (exible culture). For just culture, a focus on trust
is evident in the role of fairness of the organisation towards its
members, suggesting that this aspect requires active steering from
the management. Reporting culture focuses more on the employees being open with their organisation. The common theme of people and trust might indicate that senior managers from both
organisations view safety culture as predominantly determined
through the trustworthiness of their organisations and how this
is perceived by its members. This interpretation of the ndings is
further supported by the linguistic analysis, which found an interconnection between people and safety, as these two concepts
were grouped under one theme in both organisations. Previous linguistic analysis also found upper managements safety schema to
include people and culture, highlighting the possible connection
between the two constructs (Colley and Neal, 2012). Generally, this
nding ts descriptions of senior managers work as mainly

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331

Fig. 1. Concept maps developed by Leximancer. Note: Theme size is based on the number of concepts grouped underneath each theme. Themes are heat coded to indicate
their importance the most important is red, then orange and so on, following the colour wheel the colour. The position depends on the connectivity of the theme with other
themes. (For interpretation of the references to color in this gure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)

exerted through social interactions (e.g. Mintzberg, 1975; Tengblad, 2006). Finding a link, between people and safety, in senior
mangers thinking about their organisations safety culture highlights that managing organisational safety really means managing
people.
4.2. Differences between the two organisations
The ndings further highlighted differences in the safety culture
descriptions from senior managers of the two organisations. Senior
managers from Organisation 2 were found to focus on reporting
culture and data in the content, as well as in the linguistic analysis.
Senior managers are described as information workers (Mintzberg
et al., 1998) and safety reports from the workforce are an essential
source of their information. Through reports, senior managers stay
in touch with their organisation and they are likely to base their
decisions on this information. Furthermore, the emergence of
reporting and data can be interpreted in relation to the concepts
performance, business and capability which emerged in the linguistic analysis of the descriptions from Organisation 2. The emergence of these concepts as linked to safety suggests that senior
managers in this organisation treat safety as interlinked with the
performance of their business, which they evaluate as a competitive advantage. This leads to their ambition to measure safety
and to assess their organisations level of safety as any other performance measure. This approach reects a possible solution,
which this organisation has chosen to approach the safety production trade-off that is common in risk related industries. Because
ATM is a highly reliable industry (CAA, 2009), with safety as a crucial aspect of the product that they deliver, such a connection between business, performance and safety might be easier to
achieve than in other, less reliable industries.
Senior managers from Organisation 1 did not view their safety
culture as driven by reports and data to such an extent. Instead,
their safety culture descriptions were identied in both the content
and linguistic analyses as concentrated on management. The frequent emergence of the theme management in this organisations
sample might reect an awareness of the important role of senior
managers regarding safety culture and an acceptance of their own
responsibility for this issue, as suggested by the literature (e.g.
Michael et al., 2005) and regulators (e.g. HSE, 2007). The theme
management should be interpreted in the context of the atter
hierarchical differences that were identied as reected in the results of the linguistic analysis for this organisation. It is likely that

the organisational structure additionally promotes active involvement of senior managers at many organisational levels. However,
the frequent reference to management by senior managers from
Organisation 1 might also reect a self serving bias in that senior
managers themselves overweigh their own inuence on the positive outcomes of safety culture (e.g. Miller and Ross, 1975). The
theme time that emerged in Organisation 1 can be suggested as
a tool for senior managers to indicate what they value as important. Generally, the work of senior managers offers choice regarding the values and priorities that are related to their activities
(Tengblad, 2006). Accordingly, senior managers have a choice of
how much time they want to allocate to safety. Time allocation
conveys their value and priority to safety and is especially meaningful for senior managers, who deal with time as a limited resource (Flin, 2003; HSE, 1999). The ndings indicate that senior
managers from Organisation 1 were aware of this function of their
time allocation and also the constraints that time puts on their
work on safety.
It needs to be considered where such differences might stem
from. Both groups of managers work in organisations that are based
in a highly reliable industry and have positive safety records. Their
differences in thinking about safety culture reect different approaches towards the same issue. One reason for such differences
is the context in which the senior managers work, which might include national cultures, organisational cultures, or the size of the
organisation. National culture has been described by Mearns and
Yule (2009) as not necessarily related to safety specic behaviours
in organisations. However, it can be proposed that, for example,
power distance from Hofstedes (1983) national culture concept
contributed to the focus of senior managers on interaction with
the workforce in Organisation 1 (as the power distance score of this
Organisations country is lower than for Organisation 2). Furthermore, Organisation 1 (ca. 3000 employees) is only half the size of
Organisation 2 (ca. 6000 employees), which might facilitate interactions with the workforce. Furthermore, a bigger organisation might
be better controlled or guided through information, which can explain the focus of Organisation 2 on reporting and data.
Another source of the differences might be the managers themselves and the management teams. It is possible that their understanding of safety culture is guided by their own strengths,
weaknesses and the threats and opportunities they see in their
environment. It is likely that their sense making is ltered through
their bounded rationality, as this has been described to inuence
managerial cognition (Hambrick and Mason, 1984).

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4.3. Capturing safety culture at two levels evaluation of the methods

The two types of analysis (linguistic and content analysis) have
revealed the ways in which senior managers talk and think about
their organisations safety culture. It can be proposed that the ndings of the two forms of analysis overlap in some areas (e.g. the focus on people and safety, the role of management in Organisation
1, or the reection on data and reporting in Organisation 2). The
interconnection found between people and safety in both types
of analysis suggests that this is a manifest issue in the senior managers understanding of safety culture that is expressed both consciously and unconsciously.
However, the integration of the insights from the two types of
analysis suggested that the linguistic analysis enabled an extension
of the ndings and a clarication of the ndings meaning based on
the identication of linguistic patterns (i.e. the connection between
business and safety in Organisation 2; time as a tool for senior
managers in the hierarchically atter Organisation 1). This achievement can be attributed to this analysiss capability to tap into the
deeper, unconscious layers of the participants cultural understanding. The results show that the consideration of these deeper
layers allowed the identication of additionally issues that were
not identied as patterns on the surface of the senior managers
responses.
4.4. Strengths, limitations and future research
This study integrated traditional content analysis with linguistic analysis, which can be proposed as having enriched the ndings. These two types of analysis are complementary, as one
approaches the data deductively (content analysis), whereas the
other one is inductive (linguistic analysis). Through the investigation of senior managers understanding of safety culture via language as an artefact of culture, with the Leximancer program and
content analysis, the present study addresses three limitations reported in the safety culture and the qualitative research literatures.
First, the safety culture literature points to the limitations of the
use of questionnaires for gaining access to the deeper meanings
of culture (e.g. Flin et al., 2000). The present study applied two
types of analysis to interview data, to gain insights into the surface,
as well as the deeper layers of culture. Secondly, Guldenmund
(2000) describes the assessment of safety culture as dominated
by qualitative measures that are not easily quantiable. Through
the use of the program Leximancer and content analysis (Mayring,
2000), the qualitative phenomenon of safety culture was quantied. Thirdly, the issue of subjectivity and preconceptions of the researcher in the analysis of qualitative material is described as an
important challenge (e.g. Malterud, 2001). In fact, Elliott et al.
(1999) suggest it is impossible to detach the researchers perspective totally from qualitative research. The Leximancer program allowed a structured analysis of the data, free from subjectivity
biases, ensuring that the analysis is fully replicable.
A further strength of the present study is the investigation of
safety culture from the viewpoint of senior managers, who are an
inuential group for safety. This population is not easily accessible,
which can explain the contrast between their assigned relevance
for safety and the actual amount of research directly focussing
on them (e.g. Flin, 2003). The present studys results present insights into the way this inuential group thinks and talks about
safety culture and therefore provides highly relevant information.
Culture has been described as sense making (Reichers and Schneider, 1990), and the views from the top are likely to differ from
views from other levels of the organisation (Zohar and Luria,
2005). This suggests that the sense making presented here may
not be universal for the organisations involved. Future research
using linguistic analysis could therefore compare safety culture

perceptions from different levels of the organisation, different

organisations, as well as different industries, It should be noted
that Colley and Neal (2012) carried out such a comparison for
safety schema at different hierarchical levels of the organisation,
however they did not examine safety culture explicitly in their
interviews.
Furthermore, as Schein (2004) points out, artefacts such as language, although easy to observe are difcult to decipher. This is
also the case in the present study, as not all concepts identied
through the linguistic analysis are immediately meaningful and
their relation to Reasons safety culture model is not necessarily
clear. This linguistic analysis complemented the insights gained
from the content analysis. In order to clarify the meaning of the
identied themes from the content analysis and support their
interpretation, they were reported with quotes. However, their
selection may have been inuenced by the subjectivity of the
researchers.
It was not possible to relate this studys ndings to safety or
other performance measures. Such information was not available
to the researchers but in future research with a larger sample of
business units or organisations, it would be instructive to examine
whether dominant themes were related to outcome data.
A further limitation is the risk of bias related to interviews. It is
likely that senior managers responses were coloured by impression management, which implies that their safety culture descriptions do not express their actual views and actions. It is also
possible that the types of questions asked in the interview biased
the participants responses. However, the questions asked were
open and participants were encouraged to express their views,
allowing them to spontaneously raise issues (Travaglia et al.,
2009). Nonetheless, it needs to be acknowledged that senior managers often receive communication or media training and are likely
to know the right answers to interview questions. In order to
establish how valid the ndings of this study are and to what extent they reect genuine attitudes of the interviewees, a comparison with other safety culture data might have been valuable. For
example, gathering upward perceptions from middle managers
or observations of the senior managers actions in relation to safety
might allow insights into whether the content of senior managers
talk about safety actually matches their actions.
Furthermore, although the sample fulls saturation criteria for
qualitative analysis (Guest et al., 2006), it only represents a small
number of senior managers. It remains unclear to what extent
these ndings are applicable to other senior management teams
in the ATM industry, as well as in other industries. Nevertheless,
this study can be evaluated as an illustrative case study of different
views of senior managers on their organisations safety culture.
Finally, Smith and Humphreys (2006) emphasise that reliability,
face validity, stability (sampling of members), and reproducibility
(including structural validity, sampling of representatives, and predictive validity), have been demonstrated for the Leximancer
method. However, it should be noted that its external validity
has not been tested.
4.5. Practical implication
The use of content and linguistic analysis to gain access to the
surface and a deeper understanding of culture can be benecial
for organisational research. Visualisation of senior managers ways
of talking about safety culture can stimulate reection about their
communication, as this appears to have a key impact on safety (e.g.
Neal and Grifn, 2004). Furthermore, as language reects the way
individuals think about issues (i.e. their mental map), a visualisation of mental maps can serve as a reality check for organisational
members: Does the language we use to describe a phenomenon
like culture match our espoused values and especially our actions?

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L.S. Fruhen et al. / Safety Science 57 (2013) 326334

To what extent does this correspond to the results from a safety

culture survey? Linguistic analysis enables a consideration of what
is said between the lines of the described context in a content analysis. Both the conscious and the unconscious conceptualisation of
safety culture by senior managers are perceived by the workforce
(whether consciously or unconsciously). Leximancer might enable
more frequent use of linguistic analysis in practice, as it is relatively easy to use, cost effective and allows analysis of large
amounts of text (Colley and Neal, 2012). Linguistic analysis of senior managerial safety culture descriptions may help to reveal
their priorities and values. The ndings suggest that senior managers consciously, as well as subconsciously, view their inuence on
organisations as exerted through people. Approaches to the issue
of safety culture can differ in many respects: One organisation
was found to rely on communication and atter hierarchies,
whereas the other one placed an emphasis on controlling safety
culture through accountability and accurate data. Ultimately, this
nding indicates that there may be multiple paths towards
approaching the same goal, depending on the business environment, national culture or other factors. Senior managers can be
encouraged to reect on their own biases, as well as the context
in which they operate, and on how these factors inuence their approach towards organisational safety culture.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank EUROCONTROL for sponsoring this
study and supporting our work through the recruitment of participants. We thank Amy Irwin for her support with the content analysis. We acknowledge and thank the senior managers who have
been willing to share their valuable time and insights with us.

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Appendix A.
Frequency and connectivity of concepts from linguistic analysis.
Organisation 1

Organisation 2

Concept

Frequency

Connectivity

Concept

Frequency

Connectivity

Safety
Culture
Management
People
Important
Talk
Units
Working
Time
Started
Operational
Top
Directly
Discussions
Use
Competence
Controllers
Issues
Organisation
Wanted
Whole
Results
Build

34
34
19
13
11
11
7
7
7
6
6
6
6
5
5
5
4
4
4
3
3
3
3

100
100
56
38
32
32
21
21
21
18
18
18
18
15
15
15
12
12
12
9
9
9
9

Safety
People
Culture
Business
Accountability
Sure
Capability
Take
Clear
Level
Performance
Reporting
Understand
Organisation
Work
Improvement
Deal
Data
Improve
Leadership
Controllers
Leaders
Environment

24
22
16
10
9
7
7
6
6
6
6
6
5
4
4
4
3
3
3
3
3
2
2

100
92
67
42
38
29
29
25
25
25
25
25
21
17
17
17
12
12
12
12
12
8
8

Note: Frequency = the number of text passages identied by Leximancer as reecting the concept; concepts are ordered by their connectivity.

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