How Just Culture and Personal Goals Moderate the Positive Relation between Commercial Pilots’ Safety Citizenship Behavior and Voluntary Incident Reporting

Sebastian Sieberichs,Annette Kluge

doi:10.3390/safety7030059

Abstract

Flight safety is consistently influenced by pilots’ self-inflicted incidents in routine flight operations. For airlines, pilots’ reports on these incidents are essential input to learn from incidents (LFI) and for various safety management processes. This paper aims to explain the voluntary reporting behavior of pilots’ self-inflicted incidents from an occupational safety perspective. We investigate how the relation between pilots’ safety citizenship behavior (SCB) and reporting behavior is moderated by pilots’ fear, shame, goals, and goal-striving when reporting, as well as the influence of a just culture on the decision to report incidents. In total, 202 German commercial pilots participated in an online survey. The results showed that reporting behavior can be considered a specific form of self-intentional SCB, but should be differentiated into subtypes depending on a pilot’s unsafe acts (errors or violations) that caused the incident. Reporting behavior-specific motivational factors influenced different subtypes of reporting behavior: Just culture moderated a positive relation between SCB and reported incidents caused by violations. Moreover, depending on the subtype of reporting behavior, the relation was moderated by different types of goals in relation to the pilots. No moderating effects of fear or shame could be demonstrated. Our findings highlight the value of a just culture for encouraging goal-oriented reporting behavior in the context of LFI and safety management.

Highlights

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Hypotheses Testing Hypothesis one assumed that commercial pilots’ safety citizenship behavior is positively related to their voluntary reporting behavior of self-inflicted incidents caused by performance-based Errors (H1a), decision-making errors (H1b), and violations (H1c)
The requirement for this differentiation was underlined when considering different motivational factors; just culture and goals when reporting were found to be reporting behavior-specific motivational factors; a moderating effect of just culture on the magnitude of the positive relation between safety citizenship behavior (SCB) and reporting behavior could only be shown for violation reporting; and higher levels of just culture decreased the magnitude of this positive relation but resulted in the overall highest predicted values for violation reporting

Summary

Introduction

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Organizational members’ safe behavior is important for commercial airlines, as a class of organizations whose activities have the potential to produce major accidents [3]. This potential is increased in organizations where a tension between work and safety fosters violations of regulations [4] or errors [5,6,7]. Learning from incidents (LFI) aims to prevent future comparable occurrences by reflecting on past incidents and putting lessons learned into practice [10] In this context, scientific literature refers to near-misses as unplanned occurrences that did not result in damage but had the potential to do so [11]. In reflecting reporting systems from an occupational safety perspective, scientific results from the recent years identified several work environment-related and individual-related barriers that could limit the effectiveness of reporting systems [20]

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