3. Functionalist perspective and improving culture.
The author believes that Fosterville gold mine has a Functionalist culture, as the culture onsite is influenced and even controlled by the leaders of the group. There may be some smaller sub-cultures but ultimately each department is driven and influenced by the senior members of that workgroup.
A mechanism of culture creation is the modelling by leader figures that permits group members to identify with them and internalize their values and assumptions.(Schein, 1990)
The topic of safety culture is theoretical and there is no widely accepted model or any consensus on how to define or describe the safety culture of an organization (Nielsen, 2014), therefore the idea of being able to change…show more content… "Emotional intelligence" refers to the capacity for recognizing our own feelings and those of others, for motivating ourselves, and for managing emotions well in ourselves and in our relationships. (Goleman, 2009)
Daniel Goleman has adopted a model which includes five basic emotions, Self-awareness, Self-regulation, motivation, empathy, social skills. (Goleman, 2009)
Emotional intelligence can help leaders better understand how their words or actions can influence safety and help shape the culture of the organisation. This is imperative in a functionalist culture as the leaders are the main drivers of culture improvement.
Also by managing feelings so that they are expressed appropriately and effectively, enabling people to work together smoothly toward their common goals.(Goleman, 2009)
4. Ethics
Leaders and managers set the tone in an organization, indicating what is and is not appropriate conduct. (Pavese Kaplan, 2013) Understanding the basis of ethics will help an organisation shape their culture and help employees make the right…show more content… Fosterville Gold Mine has a corporate code of business conduct and ethics policy which spells out the basic assumptions and legal responsibilities. This document is used as a loose guide and the decision about what is ethical is normally left up to those in the management or leadership positions onsite.
Conclusion
The aim of this paper was to prepare a management report to try and explain what safety culture is and to also look at the safety culture at Fosterville Gold Mine with the intention of providing advice on how the safety culture could be improved.
As mentioned at the start of this report the topic of safety culture is generally theoretical and there is a multitude of different ideas and thoughts about what safety culture is and how to define it, a simple way of defining what a safety culture is would be to say “the way we do things around here” or “how the organisation behaves when no one is
