| Abstract: |
Organisational culture is assumed to be a key factor in large-scale and
avoidable institutional failures (e.g. accidents, corruption). Whilst models
such as “ethical culture” and “safety culture” have been used to explain such
failures, minimal research has investigated their ability to do so, and a
single and unified model of the role of culture in institutional failures is
lacking. To address this, we systematically identified case study articles
investigating the relationship between culture and institutional failures
relating to ethics and risk management (n = 74). A content analysis of the
cultural factors leading to failures found 23 common factors and a common
sequential pattern. First, culture is described as causing practices that
develop into institutional failure (e.g. poor prioritisation, ineffective
management, inadequate training). Second, and usually sequentially related to
causal culture, culture is also used to describe the problems of correction:
how people, in most cases, had the opportunity to correct a problem and avert
failure, but did not take appropriate action (e.g. listening and responding to
employee concerns). It was established that most of the cultural factors
identified in the case studies were consistent with survey-based models of
safety culture and ethical culture. Failures of safety and ethics also largely
involve the same causal and corrective factors of culture, although some
aspects of culture more frequently precede certain outcome types (e.g.
management not listening to warnings more commonly precedes a loss of human
life). We propose that the distinction between causal and corrective culture
can form the basis of a unified (combining both ethical and safety culture
literatures) and generalisable model of organisational failure. |