This paper deals with safety from an organizational perspective. Accidents are actually used by individual mistakes. However the underlying causes of accidents are often organizational. As a link between these two levels - the organizational failures and mistakes - I suggest the concept of role distance, which emphasizes the organizational characteristics. The general hypothesis is that organizational goals are a main cause of role distance and accident proneness within organizations. Three different dimensions of ‘safety as a goal’ are distinguished: priority of safety, and contradictory interests horizontally and vertically. The analysis at different levels does not falsify our hypothesis, and these three dimensions seem to be of interest for the safety in chemical industry.
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Paper provided by University of Groningen, Research Institute SOM (Systems, Organisations and Management) in its series Research Report with number
00A36.