Measuring psychological safety and local learning to enable high reliability organisational change.

The ability to measure the extent to which an organisation is highly reliable, or the extent to which reliability may change over time, has not kept up with the development of theory. The paper examines aspects of workplace culture, employee motivation and leadership behaviours that support continuous learning and improvement in an effort to measure the transition to high reliability.To evaluate the effectiveness of its high reliability initiative, one children's hospital sought to build measures that would provide an assessment of progressive movement towards a 'culture of safety', and track the success over time.