Ethics Newsline®

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida
NASA managers so far have failed to fully embrace changes in the way the agency does business, leaving many workers afraid to raise concerns and worried they will be stigmatized if they do, a new report warns.

The report by a California-based consulting firm was commissioned by NASA to gauge improvements in its corporate culture, which was fingered as a chief factor in the safety mistakes leading to the destruction of the Columbia shuttle and its crew in February 2003.

“Safety is something to which NASA personnel are strongly committed in concept, but NASA has not yet created a culture that is fully supportive of safety,” the 145-page report says, according to a report from the Associated Press. “Open communication is not yet the norm, and people do not feel fully comfortable raising safety concerns to management.”

Last week, NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe and deputy associate administrator James Jennings said they were prepared to walk the talk themselves and expel any employee who failed to follow suit.

“The leadership’s got to take it on, starting with me,” O’Keefe said, according to the AP.

The new report examined survey results from NASA’s 18,000 employees, less than half of whom completed the anonymous survey, indicating a persistently high level of fear, according to Jennings.

Astronaut James Wetherbee said that while many are afraid of being fired, others are afraid of being shunted into dead-end projects that kill careers. “If I’m somebody who’s always slowing down the process, always speaking up, then I don’t get listened to anymore,” he said

The new report was released last week by NASA and authored by California-based Behavioral Science Technology Inc., which has proposed a three-year plan for improving the ethical culture at NASA.