In recent years, the importance of a strong, positive safety culture has been studied, discussed, and written about extensively. Safety culture has been defined as the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies, and patterns of behavior that determine the commitment to, and the style and proficiency of, an organization's health and safety management. The safety culture of an organization is often considered in the context of prevention of accidents and injuries to the employees of that organization. This situation falls within the domain of occupational safety. In this context, the need for safety culture is relatively well understood and directly relatable to the members of the organization, since the beneficiaries are from the population itself. Safety cultures of organizations engaged in system safety work have some aspects in common with their counterparts in occupational safety; however, many aspects are different, since system safety aims to reduce safety risks throughout the life cycle of the product or system in question, and therefore, the beneficiaries of the improved safety culture may include not only the workers of the facility or organization producing the product or system, but also the end users (customers, operators), as well as the general public and the environment. When implementing a system safety program, an organization should work to ensure that a strong, positive safety culture pervades the organization. With a weak, non-existent, or even negative safety culture, the system safety practitioner?s work is burdened, and the effectiveness of the system safety effort is reduced. On the other hand, when the system safety effort is undertaken in a strong safety culture, the entire team, including designers, developers, system engineers, testers, quality engineers, configuration control specialists, and management are all constructively contributing to system safety.
