The Relationship Between Religiosity and Process Safety Culture

Human factors studies conducted over the last several decades have reported insights into the ways that people perceive, interpret, and make inferences and decisions in situations that pose risks, and efforts have been made to apply the results of such studies in safety-related program development and policy planning. Workplace safety culture in the chemical process industries has been the subject of much recent development in the field of chemical process safety. Within a facility’s safety culture, the distinct social and cultural differences among individuals may play a role in maintaining safe operations. Whether it relates to the degree of adherence to safety rules and regulations or to the actual perception of risks, workers’ decisions are related to their personal perceptions, beliefs, experiences, and knowledge. One personal difference that affects an individual’s perceptions and behavior is religiosity, or religiousness, which refers to the numerous aspects of religious activity, dedication, and belief. Religiosity deals with how religious a person is and not with what religion a person practices.

Research has indicated that religiosity affects people’s decision-making processes by affecting their belief systems (values)—the same event can be viewed differently depending on an individual’s religious views. In fact, research has indicated that religiosity may be closely linked to one’s risk preference; therefore, it has the potential for influencing participation in certain unsafe behaviors at work. Such differences are evidence that our perceptions and beliefs can influence event appraisal on an unconscious level and are not unlike human factors such as familiarity, benign experiences, and hyper-vigilance, which have been widely documented to affect behavior in the workplace. The impact of religiosity on safety perception and safety behavior is important to understand how people from differing backgrounds perceive safety at work and make inferences and decisions in terms of safety and health in the workplace and should not be ignored.

This paper will discuss the influence of religiosity on workers’ safety perceptions and safety related behavior and the potential effect on safety programs as well as accident causation in the process industry. It will also discuss how global and diverse companies such as chemical, petroleum, and associated process industries can utilize this knowledge to design robust safety programs that help maintain a positive culture of process safety through targeted training programs and behavior based interventions.