Abstract
Abstract
This study investigates the relationship between safety culture and adoption of innovation, and is intended to characterise the way they interact in an organisational environment. The empirical evidences for this research are accumulated from a healthcare organisation and an offshore organisation in Norway. The research propositions for this study are built upon a broad literature review of two independent topics, namely safety culture and adoption of innovation. Two propositions aim to identify the level of safety and the safety culture within the two organisations analysed. Additionally, three propositions aim to recognise important factors of a successful organisational innovation adoption. The research is based on qualitative analysis of primary data acquired through interviews with organisational members within the two units of analysis. The two organisations analysed are considered to be high-risk organisations with a continuous requirement for improvement through innovation.
The research expresses the analytical methods and anchors the findings by establishing a triangulation through theoretical frameworks, data collection methods and data collection units. The coexisting perspectives, methods and data collection units evolve independently throughout the research and in the end converge to acknowledge potential relations between safety culture and innovation adoption.
The empirical evidences consistently indicate that there are synergies between safety culture and the processes of adopting innovation; the capabilities essential for the advancement of safety culture are equally required for the practice of organisational innovation adoption. Consequently a relationship between the two phenomena is proposed. This put forward a request for further research on the association between safety culture and innovation adoption.