Generally, safety professionals have advisory role. Any advise from company's safety professional(s) may be taken with good heart, reluctantly accepted because of pressure from top management or will be rejected vehemently. Sometimes, safety professionals will be questioned about their knowledge/experience/capability in matters of production activities and production managers try to draw a line saying that they are more capable of taking care of their work and also of safety in their work place and that they do not need any advise from safety professionals.
However, when some incident happens, safety professional of the company will become the first target of these production managers, saying that they were not sufficiently warned about the hazard, that the safety professional slept without doing his job, and so on. This will be the case even if there were some incidents in the work place.
Surprisingly, sometimes, even regulators too question safety professionals of the company instead of engaging the production managers for safety related lapses in the work place.
The ego in the minds of production managers (and down below) is an obstacle to listen to the voice of safety professional and this endangers safety of employees in the work place. They do not accept the fact that there is something (mindset to see the dangers and to learn lessons from events) missing on their part leading to occurrence of nearmisses, incidents and accidents. Any occurrence is taken as onetime affair and is not acknowledged for system deficiencies. Even efforts will be made to cover up the issues or not to bring to the notice of safety professional for investigation and thus do not want to learn lessons.
The case studies, lessons from occurrence that are freely available in the internet are taken as too theoretical or that these are not applicable to their work place. Nobody can help such managers and those working under them will only become easy prey to the hidden dangers.