A holistic approach to evaluating the effect of safety barriers on the performance of safety reporting systems in aviation organisations

Safety reporting systems are a necessary component of any Safety Management System (SMS) in contemporary aviation organisations. Improving the performance of safety reporting systems can significantly enhance the reliability of safety information and allow the implementation of more effective risk assessment processes. Previous researchers have identified several barriers that influence the effectiveness of safety reporting systems, ranging from individual barriers to organisational issues. However, none of these studies has addressed the concomitant effect of the different barriers as a means of determining the overall effect on the performance of existing reporting systems. This paper proposes a holistic approach to this problem by developing a model that can help to determine the cumulative effect of organisational, working environment and individual barriers on the performance of a safety reporting system in an aviation organisation. The Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) technique was used to examine the relationships amongst the different variables considered in our study. The model was constructed using a broad range of data collected from a survey conducted in a military aviation organisation, with the purpose of identifying the barriers to reporting in this particular context. Results show that the proposed model allows to accurately quantify the impact of the various concomitant barriers in the reporting system, providing a powerful resource to assist stakeholders in the decision-making process that is inherent to the implementation of tailored actions to improve the safety performance of aviation organisations.