The Role of Leadership and Development of Management Systems to Ensure Effective Safety Performance
Abstract
Safety is one of the crucial issues that industry has aimed at improving for many decades and continues to progress. Discoveries show that organizations optimize their effort when they provide effective management systems to support front line employees, supervisors, and senior level managers. In this research, the role of leaders regarding safety in the energy industry is studied, and moreover, how to develop safety management systems to ensure an effective safety performance is surveyed.
Leadership has the greatest impact on safety improvement. Leaders by different techniques can increase their influence on employees; set the mission and vision for staff; implement rules; provide resources; improve the teamwork; make effective communication from top to bottom, bottom to top and along the organization, educate staff, develop a safety management system, and create safety culture in the organization. By organizational safety culture, I mean the shared common values that drive organizational performance, more commonly defined as “the way we do around here.”
While there are regulations regarding safety, every organization requires self-standard beyond the codified rules to have effective safety programs. Regulations should follow new research to develop new management systems to ensure the highest standards for safety. Developing safety systems to have a sustainable safety performance is an obligation. Hence, for the energy system, some components have to be considered in safety matters: type of resources, support characters, and their relation to safety issues. In addition, other components include the time frame for productions (exploration), the output shape and associated hazards, area that these resources are located at, and distribution systems and hazards.
A safety management system helps leaders and managers control and evaluate safety by using safety metrics such as leading and lagging indicators. Management systems such as process safety management, risk management plan, and Seveso Directive are some management programs that organizations are still arguing for complete and correct implementation to become a zero-incident-organization.
Citation
Niknezhad, Seyedshayan (2017). The Role of Leadership and Development of Management Systems to Ensure Effective Safety Performance. Master's thesis, Texas A & M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /165913.