How Culture Shapes: A Series on National Culture and Its Influence on Risk Management

Why national culture matters in risk management and what to do about it.

If you're a frequent reader of my blog, you've likely noticed a common theme and an important distinction in contemporary safety science. Risk and safety management are about understanding and changing the context in which decisions and actions occur. However, organizations and organizational behaviors don't exist in vacuums. They are also the result of larger social, political, and cultural ecologies. 

National cultural factors influence all aspects of society and permeate organizations at every level. Cultural factors influence safety behavior in ways that are often outside a manager’s direct control. Yet, these factors significantly shape worker and organizational behaviors, and even risk management itself. Even the most well-intentioned strategies may fall short if these external influences are not recognized and accounted for.

Effective risk managers understand how culture shapes the work system. My inquiry journey in this space started when I was ski guiding in Chile. Sitting with another guide, we watched as our clients, local skiers, recklessly skied consequential avalanche terrain. We did everything we were trained to do, including extensive safety briefings, modeling and skier assessment, and followed a plan involving more progressively complex terrain choices throughout the day. However, it seemed like something deeper was involved in decision-making and safety behavior was occurring that was perhaps beyond our control. We couldn't help but wonder if culture played a role.

A few months later, when I resumed my work in South Korea building an outdoor education program, I carried this question with me. I became obsessed with it, and as each season went by, I became increasingly convinced that culture plays a role in safety behavior and risk management. I eventually went back to school and studied this question. Now, I see it everywhere, and these insights have made me a better risk manager, both at home and abroad. 

This series, Culture Shapes, explores how national culture influences risk and safety management in outdoor programming. I share my academic, practical, and personal insights and offer tangible ways to see and navigate culture and its effects, ultimately strengthening your approach and enhancing your risk management work.

What is Culture?

Culture encompasses the values, assumptions, beliefs, rituals, and behaviors shared by a social group or society. These traits unconsciously develop over generations to shape collective identity and guide interactions.

One of the most widely used cultural frameworks is Hofstede's dimensions of national culture. In the 1980s, Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede developed the dimensions through a large-scale survey of IBM employees conducted in the '60s and '70s across multiple countries. The dimensions provide a framework for organizing patterns in cultural values that influence people's behavior. They have been applied extensively in management fields, including safety science.

The dimensions and regional classifications have continued to evolve as more sectors have participated in the study and new generations of people are at prime working ages.

However, the dimensions aren't without critique. A common one is that they can oversimplify cultural differences. Some question their relevance as societies today are highly connected and globalized, and we are seeing human migration on an unprecedented scale.

For these reasons and more, I suggest viewing the dimensions from a 50,000-ft view–to help see the forest through the trees. Culture is nuanced, complex, and challenging to see. It's often unconsciously internalized, meaning people rarely recognize their own cultural norms and preferences until they encounter a different perspective in a way that challenges their assumptions and reveals that their worldview is not universally shared. I find the dimensions are most useful in helping to see beyond my own culture and in helping to name the approaches and mindsets that influence team and organizational behavior.

In addition to Hofstede’s dimensions of national and regional cultural values, this series draws on social and self-identity factors such as ability, gender, ethnicity, and social class. Outdoor and experiential education dialogue and the academic literature extensively explore these influences and their impacts, primarily through bottom-up, participant-characteristics-driven approaches, and top-down approaches that examine how these factors influence common programming goals and practices.

Contemporary safety science research takes a middle-out approach to national culture, exploring how these factors might affect organizational safety culture. This body of work indicates that national culture has a relationship with safety culture by shaping organizational priorities and their overall approach to risk management. For more information about various constructs of culture, see my Definitive Guide post.

 The research literature is vast, complex, and nuanced. However, risk managers who understand a few fundamental concepts are able to recognize these influences in real life, and are more adept at targeting them, thus enabling them to create culturally relevant, and ultimately, more effective risk management systems.

Lessons from Safety Science

This work is grounded in contemporary safety science, which has been applied in large, safety-critical, and global domains such as nuclear power, maritime shipping, and oil and gas. These industries have invested in robust safety research agendas that outdoor activity programs can learn from because they all share key characteristics. These domains are examples of complex sociotechnical systems where human behavior and technical components are tightly coupled and are influenced by similar external pressures. All of these factors interact to shape safety performance and safety outcomes. 

Aviation is a particularly useful parallel because, like outdoor programs, it originates from the Western cultural paradigm and operates in low societal risk tolerance—meaning there are high expectations for safety. The same is true for outdoor activity programs, where a child's safety is paramount, and parent's trust in the services these organizations provide is essential. Cultural dimensions, like power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and motivations for success have been tested by aviation safety researchers and offer valuable insights for outdoor organizations seeking to improve their risk management systems.

Hofstede’s National Culture Dimensions. Adapted from “Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations” (2nd ed.), 2001, Sage Publications. Copyright 2001 by Geert Hofstede. and “Dimensionalizing cultures: The Hofstede model in context,” by G. Hofstede, 2011, Online Readings in Psychology and Culture, 2(1). CC.

National Culture's Relationship with Safety Culture

It’s important to keep in mind that national culture is associated with safety culture, but it is not directly causal. Although the two concepts are related, national culture alone doesn't determine the characteristics of an organization's safety culture or dictate whether one group of people is inherently safer than another.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of negative attention on Asian, and in particular Korean, airline pilots and that they are inherently less safe than Western pilots because of a few cultural traits. Pop-science writers have encouraged this line of thinking, which I find to be short-sighted, overly simplistic, and deterministic. Yuval Harari warns against this type of thinking, calling it "culturalism," which is akin to racism and other kinds of malicious attitudes.

My own academic research and lived experiences (I've worked outside my home country for the majority of my career) indicate that culture can be problematic only when viewed within the context of the design logic of the system itself. In other words, people build systems, and the tools and processes that comprise the system assume the cultural traits of the people who design them. Cultural factors, then, can introduce risk only when the traits of the people working in the system intersect with the cultural assumptions built into the system itself. In my research, this is called "cultural risk." In the case of Korean pilots, contemporary safety science thinking indicates that their attitudes and norms alone aren't a problem until they interact with Western aviation designers' intent, which is evidenced in the training curriculum, standard operating procedures, and even the physical design of the aircraft itself. More on this to come throughout this Culture Shapes series.

What to Expect from This Series

This series will explore how culture influences risk management through:

• Real-life case studies and stories from aviation, outdoor programs, and my own work.

• Insights from safety science that help explain how cultural dimensions and other factors shape risk perception, safety behavior, and decision-making.

• Highlights from my own research on cultural risk, highlighting novel insights and tangible ways risk managers can use culture to improve safety participation and performance.

• Practical takeaways that can be immediately implemented to make risk management work more effective at home and abroad.

Join the Conversation

This series is intended to make cultural influences on risk management more tangible and actionable. To stay updated, subscribe to my newsletter for new posts. I send a short and sweet monthly newsletter to announce new posts and share other insights and musings on culture, climate resiliency, and safety science.

If you're looking for more hands-on support, I help organizations apply these insights in their unique contexts through staff training, coaching, and program review and improvement work. Feel free to reach out to chat about how we can work together.