The role of safety professionals in organizations - developing and testing a framework of competing safety management principles

Safety professionals have a key role in influencing the safety of an industrial organization. Relatively little research attention has been paid to this professional group. Many safety professionals apply the principles that underlie their field of technical expertise or refer to lay theories and folk models of human behavior. Recent conceptualizations of organizations as complex adaptive systems have put further challenges in our understanding of safety professionals' work. What is the role of a safety professional in a system that is inherently unpredictable, as complex adaptive systems theories proclaim? In light of our increased understanding of the complexity and dynamics of safety-critical organizations is there a need to rethink the role of safety professionals? The paper will focus on the underlying principles that the safety professionals rely on in their work. The study design is a longitudinal study of nine safety professionals in three different safety-critical organizations. A model of eight distinct management principles is tested and mechanisms that influence the formation of each professional's role are identified. The potential tensions between the different principles will be discussed as well as the influencing mechanisms in defining which principles are emphasized and which not.