Abstract:

The fundamental feature of safety culture is represented by safety attitudes. In terms of measuring safety cultures, many researchers have mainly focused on explicit safety attitudes and generally relied on specific survey instruments. It is questionable, however, whether self-report measures can capture all aspects of organizational safety culture. Instead of getting direct answers, it is necessary to introduce implicit measures and the implicit safety attitudes test into safety culture evaluation. The basic hypothesis of this study was that while various enterprises share different safety culture, the structure and intensity of implicit and explicit safety attitudes differ for employees. The present study was aimed at investigating the complete model of aviation safety culture and the importance of implicit safety attitudes by detecting the relationship between explicit and implicit safety attitudes as well as the prediction effect of implicit safety attitudes. The Flight Management Attitudes Questionnaire (FMAQ 2.0, international version) was adopted in this study which was based on the work characteristics of modern airlines pilots. With the purpose of evaluating explicit safety attitudes under the background of aviation safety culture, FMAQ 2.0 is comprised of three subscales, including basic organizational attitudes, cockpit work attitudes, and flight automation attitudes. Moreover, Evaluative Implicit Association Test and Affective Implicit Association Test were developed for aviatic implicit safety attitudes test. 134 pilots were involved in the investigation, 126 valid cases were obtained. Safety performance were obtained from airline company on four dimensions, including safety regulation, flight style, flight skill and organizational management was applied for validity criterion. The results showed that (1) IAT of aviation safety attitudes indicated a high effect value, aviation safety led to more positive evaluation and feelings while flight risk and adventure were more connected with negative evaluation and emotion. (2) Implicit and explicit safety attitudes were both relevant and relative separation. There was a positive relation between evaluative implicit safety attitudes and cockpit work attitudes. Affective implicit safety attitudes showed significant positive correlation with cockpit work attitudes and flight automation attitudes. And the model data showed that implicit and explicit safety attitudes were separation structure. (3) Both the flight management attitudes and implicit safety attitudes were able to predict safety performance. The former were doing better on predicting flight style, flight skill and organizational management, while the latter had higher prediction rate on safety regulation. The common prediction model fitted well. The study demonstrated a high intensity of aviation safety attitudes. IAT can be used as an effective evaluation tool for implicit safety attitudes. Explicit and implicit safety attitudes are both unified and separated structure. The explicit safety attitudes, implicit safety attitudes and safety performance together constitute a complete model of aviation safety culture. And in this model, the outer layer is aviation safety performance, the middle layer is explicit safety attitudes which can be measured directly, the inner layer is implicit safety attitudes which can be evaluated by indirect measurement methods.

Key words: aviation safety culture, implicit safety attitudes, Implicit Association Test, safety performance