Safety culture: a tool to improve corporative competitiveness

Occupational accidents severely deteriorate human capital, negatively affecting the productivity and competitiveness of countries. But despite this, we still observe a scarcity of preventive practices, an unsatisfactory management commitment and an absence of safety culture among firms. The result is evident in firms' high accident rates. This situation is a consequence of the general belief among firms that investing in safety is a cost, and hence has negative repercussions for their competitiveness. The current work aims to develop a model of a positive safety culture, and analyse the effect of this model on a set of indicators of organisational performance. The results show the beneficial role the managers of the firm, because they can influence on safety behaviours of employees in direct and indirect way. Moreover, the results obtained confirm that this model has a positive incidence on business performance, which could lead to create competitive advantage for firms