Bisbey et al.
What is safety culture?
Shared values, attitudes, and norms that prioritize safety.
What is safety knowledge?
Understanding safe practices, procedures, and risks.
Name one organizational or system failure that contributed to the Bhopal disaster.
Poor maintenance, cost-cutting, lack of emergency systems, or weak safety culture.
Name 2 enabling factor that supports the development of safety culture.
Leader commitment, policies/resources, group cohesion, psychological safety, safety knowledge/skills, employee control, or individual commitment.
In Kao et al. (2019), what mediates the link between safety knowledge and safety behavior?
Worker safety attitudes.
When and where did the Bhopal incident happen?
India in 1984 (1980s).
Name 2 enacting behavior that brings safety culture to life at work.
Communication, teamwork, incident reporting, or fair reward/punishment systems.
According to the K-A-B framework and Kao et al. (2019), what should organizations focus on in practice to ensure safety knowledge leads to safer behaviors?
In practice, they should strengthen safety training and ensure supervisor commitment to safety.
Why did the Bhopal gas disaster happen?
Because of weak safety culture, poor maintenance, cost-cutting, and lack of emergency preparedness.
The statement "All employees must wear PPE before entering the site.” belongs to which layer of safety culture?
values
Using the KAB framework, explain how it works and identify which steps broke down in the Bhopal disaster.
The KAB framework shows that safety knowledge builds positive attitudes, which drive safe behaviors; in Bhopal, weak safety knowledge and negative safety attitudes failed first, leading to unsafe behaviors and catastrophic outcomes.
Using Bisbey’s framework, name two enabling factors missing in Bhopal that worsened the disaster and explain why.
Leader commitment to safety and adequate safety policies/resources.
According to Bisbey et al. (2021), how do enabling factors, enacting behaviors, and the four cultural layers (assumptions, values, norms & artifacts, enacted behaviors) interact to explain why safety culture can either develop into a strong system or break down into failure?
Enabling factors like leadership commitment, resources, and psychological safety provide the foundation; enacting behaviors such as communication and reporting bring safety culture to life; and over time, these shape the four layers—deep assumptions, guiding values, visible norms/artifacts, and daily practices—which reinforce each other; if enabling factors and enacting behaviors are weak, the layers fail to align, leading to unsafe culture and higher risk of disasters.
In Kao et al. (2019), how does the study’s multilevel, multisource, time-lagged design strengthen the evidence for the role of safety attitudes in mediating between knowledge and behavior?
By collecting data from workers and supervisors at two time points and analyzing both individual and group levels, the study shows more reliably that safety knowledge shapes attitudes, which then influence behaviors, while supervisor attitudes moderate this process.
How could combining Bisbey’s safety culture framework and Kao’s KAB model explain the systemic breakdown at Bhopal?
Enabling factors like leadership commitment and safety resources were missing (Bisbey), while poor safety knowledge and negative attitudes meant knowledge never translated into safe behaviors (Kao); together, this breakdown in culture and KAB processes made the disaster inevitable.