The Spectrum of Safety-Related Rule Violations

Abstract

In a production context, safety-related rule violations are often associated with rule breaking and unsafe behavior even if violations are not necessarily malevolent. Nevertheless, our past experiments indicated a range of strategies between violation and rule compliance. Based on this finding, different types of rule-related behavior for managing organizations’ goal conflict between safety and productivity are assumed. To deepen the understanding of rule violations, the behavior of 152 participants in a business simulation was analyzed. Participants operated a plant as a production worker for 36 simulated weeks. In each week, they could choose to comply with safety rules or to violate them in order to maximize their salary. A cluster analysis of the 5,472 decisions made on how to operate the plant included the severity of the violations, the number of times participants changed their rule-related strategy, and the extent of failure/success of these strategies. Five clusters of rule-related behavior were extracted: the compliant but ineffective “executor” (15%), the production-optimizing and behavioral variable “optimizer” (13%), the successful and compliant “well behaved” (36%), the notoriously violating “inconvincible” (29%), and the “experimenter” (7%), who does not succeed with various violating strategies.