Do we have a domain-specific group culture?

Abstract

Human operators have a significant role in operating socio-technical systems, and thus understanding the performance of an operating team is important to ensure their safety. Among various factors affecting the performance of an operating team, its cultural characteristics are known as one of the dominant factors. If the cultural characteristics of each operating team in a specific domain can be regarded as the distance from the representative culture of a group in the same domain, it is necessary to firstly identify domain-specific group culture in advance to account for team culture. In this regard, we analyze empirical data collected from different groups with diverse conditions in nuclear power plants to identify a domain-specific group culture in the nuclear industry. We derive four representative classes of cultural factors affecting the formation of group cultures from a review of existing literature and, accordingly, design a catalog of experimental sets to confirm the existence of a domain-specific group culture. Additional data were collected based on Hofstede's cultural indices. The results showed that two Hofstede's indices are promising to represent domain-specific group culture in the nuclear industry.