Measuring Resilience Engineering: An Integrative Review and Framework for Bench-Marking Organisational Safety

Gaël Morel,Manikam Pillay

doi:10.3390/safety6030037

Abstract

Interest in resilience engineering for improving organisational safety continues to grow among safety scholars and practitioners, but little attention has focused on a unifying definition, characteristics, and instruments for quantitative measurements. This is a significant gap which can impede efforts at benchmarking and evaluating resilience engineering for organisational safety. This integrative review was undertaken to address this research-practice gap in order to inform a theoretical framework. A five steep integrative literature review process was used to retrieve and critically evaluate peer-reviewed quantitative research articles published or in press from 2003 to November 2019. From the 3884 studies identified, screened, and selected, 17 met the final inclusion criteria. In total, 15 specific instruments were identified, but only four were grounded on a theoretical framework or model—the most common instrument used for included structured surveys. A minimum of three and a maximum of 13 characteristics were measured; however, it is not clear what type of variables they represented. The six most common characteristics included top management commitment, just culture, learning culture, awareness, preparedness, and flexibility. An integrative model of how these can inform a Resilience Climate Questionnaire (RCQ) survey is presented.

Highlights

The effective management of organisation safety continues to attract the attention of academics, managers, and policy makers throughout the world
Findings from this review suggest that six key dimensions provide used to inform a practical survey instrument for measuring, benchmarking, and improving Resilience engineering (RE) as an a good starting point for measuring RE through resilience climate, which is the measurable facet of RE
This review was aimed at reviewing the conceptualization, definition and measurement of RE—identifying any instruments used, and the psychometric measures tested, in order to inform a theoretical framework and measurement instrument that can be used to advance research and practice in the field

Summary

Introduction

The effective management of organisation safety continues to attract the attention of academics, managers, and policy makers throughout the world. Consistent with contemporary safety practices, most efforts in this regard have focused on unwanted outcomes, injuries and losses arising from adverse events. While there are several strategies for achieving these (such as legislation, behavioural measures, ergonomics, risk management and safety management systems), most of these are based on the assumption that safety can be achieved by people performing work through prescribed norms, following procedures and rules, and reducing human error This represented a safety I philosophy [2,3]; with safety defined as the absence of negative outcomes and operations deemed to be safe when the number of events that could go wrong were maintained at acceptably low levels. They focused on identifying and managing deviations from prescribed work

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Discussion

Conclusion