LAUSR

Abstract Traditional approaches to occupational safety and health (OSH) management, including the systematic approach, perceive OSH as freedom from inexpedient events like occupational accidents or near-miss incidents that very often result from dysfunctional OSH management. However, from the resilience engineering perspective, it is necessary to examine OSH management not only in terms of failures, i.e. inexpedient events, but also in terms of success factors. Two fundamental concepts within resilience engineering theory are the four cornerstones (learning, monitoring, responding and anticipating) and trade-offs. The article presents results of the study aimed at assessing which cornerstones and trade-offs predominate in the practice of upper and lower-tier enterprises in Poland that are obliged by law in force to implement safety management systems. Findings obtained show that in the enterprises studied procedures and/or organisational measures support them in taking decisions with respect to two trade-offs: distributed-concentrated and optimality-fragility ones. With regard to the cornerstones the results show that the Polish enterprises deal the best with responding, which is directly in line with legal provisions regarding the implementation of the safety management system by upper and lower-tier enterprises. Learning is rated the lowest, especially with regard to information about positive or neutral situations from the point of view of safety. Moreover the use of leading indicators predominates over the use of lagging indicators and analysis of immeasurable aspects.