Understanding and Predicting Compliance with Safety Regulations at an Airline Ground Service Organization

Abstract

Failures to comply with safety regulations are currently a major issue at many airline ground service organizations across the world. To address this issue, approaches based on an external regulation of the employees’ behavior have been proposed. Unfortunately, an externally imposed control is often not internalized by employees and has a short term effect on their performance. To achieve a long-term effect, employees need to be internally motivated to adhere to regulations. To understand the role of motivation for compliance in ground service organizations, a formal agent-based model is proposed in this chapter based on theories from Social Science. The model incorporates cognitive, social, and organizational aspects. The model was simulated and partially validated by a case study performed at a real airline ground service organization. The model was able to reproduce behavioral patterns related to compliance of the platform employees in this study.