The development stages underlying the concept of the Safety Culture State Review are based on the idea developed by Stephen Covey for highly effective people. According to Covey these states are dependent, independent and interdependent. Bradley transferred this model to the description of the state of a company-specific occupational safety culture and added the reactive level. In addition, a relation was drawn between the state of safety culture and safety performance.

In order to make this general model more concrete to use, a scale from 1 to 8 is introduced for the safety culture axis to visualize the Safety Culture State Review Index, and for the safety performance axis with a scale from A to E.

The modified Bradley curve

According to Covey’s concept of maturity continuum the meaning of the three states is (Reference: Covey, S., The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. London, 2020, pp. 49):

  • Dependence is the paradigm of ‘you’. Dependent people need others to get what they want.
  • Independence is the paradigm of ‘I’. Independent people can get what they want through their own effort.
  • Interdependence is the paradigm of ‘we’. Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.

Additionally the meaning of the fourth level is:

  • Reactive is the paradigm of ‘minimalism’. Any progress is made by chance.

Applied to a company’s safety culture, the development stages have the following meaning:

  • depentent – ‘zero’ (accidents) is unrealistic, management commitment, compliance is focus, process and procedures driven.
  • independent – ‘zero’ (accidents) by chance, personal commitment, self-responsibility.
  • interdependent – ‘zero (accidents) by choice, team commitment, HSE is a company’s core value.
  • reactive – accidents happen, can’t be avoided, no management commitment.

A companies’ Safety Culture could be categoriesed based on the four states as following.

20 dimensions that significantly influencing the companies’ safety culture

Carrying out a Safety Culture State Review Survey