Rule Compliance Research Articles

Reducing Organizational Rule Breaking Through Task Variety: How Task Design Supports Deliberative Thinking

In this paper we argue that task design affects rule breaking in the workplace. Specifically, we propose that task variety activates deliberative (Type 2) processes as opposed to automatic/intuitive (Type 1) processes, which, in turn, helps prevent individuals from breaking rules in order to serve their own hedonic self-interest. We use data from the home loan application processing operations of a Japanese bank to establish the phenomenon in the field. We document that increased task variety at a daily level is associated with lower levels of rule breaking in the form of violating corporate break time policies (Study 1). We further explore the relationship between task variety and rule breaking in three lab experiments, using different operationalizations of rule breaking (Studies 2, 3a, and 3b) and provide direct evidence for the mediating effect of deliberative thinking in this relationship (Studies 3a and 3b). We discuss implications for rule compliance in organizations, behavioral ethics, and work design.

Using cognitive pre-testing methods in the development of a new evidenced-based pressure ulcer risk assessment instrument.

BackgroundVariation in development methods of Pressure Ulcer Risk Assessment Instruments has led to inconsistent inclusion of risk factors and concerns about content validity. A new evidenced-based Risk Assessment Instrument, the Pressure Ulcer Risk Primary Or Secondary Evaluation Tool - PURPOSE-T was developed as part of a National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) funded Pressure Ulcer Research Programme (PURPOSE: RP-PG-0407-10056). This paper reports the pre-test phase to assess and improve PURPOSE-T acceptability, usability and confirm content validity.MethodsA descriptive study incorporating cognitive pre-testing methods and integration of service user views was undertaken over 3 cycles comprising PURPOSE-T training, a focus group and one-to-one think-aloud interviews. Clinical nurses from 2 acute and 2 community NHS Trusts, were grouped according to job role. Focus group participants used 3 vignettes to complete PURPOSE-T assessments and then participated in the focus group. Think-aloud participants were interviewed during their completion of PURPOSE-T.After each pre-test cycle analysis was undertaken and adjustment/improvements made to PURPOSE-T in an iterative process. This incorporated the use of descriptive statistics for data completeness and decision rule compliance and directed content analysis for interview and focus group data. Data were collected April 2012-June 2012.ResultsThirty-four nurses participated in 3 pre-test cycles. Data from 3 focus groups, 12 think-aloud interviews incorporating 101 PURPOSE-T assessments led to changes to improve instrument content and design, flow and format, decision support and item-specific wording. Acceptability and usability were demonstrated by improved data completion and appropriate risk pathway allocation. The pre-test also confirmed content validity with clinical nurses.ConclusionsThe pre-test was an important step in the development of the preliminary PURPOSE-T and the methods used may have wider instrument development application. PURPOSE-T proposes a new approach to pressure ulcer risk assessment, incorporating a screening stage, the inclusion of skin status to distinguish between those who require primary prevention and those who require secondary prevention/treatment and the use of colour to support pathway allocation and decision making. Further clinical evaluation is planned to assess the reliability and validity of PURPOSE-T and it’s impact on care processes and patient outcomes.

Mind the gap: a qualitative approach to assessing why different sub-cultures within high-risk industries interpret safety rule gaps in different ways

Measuring the distance between the performance of safety rules as imagined and safety rules as enacted in high-risk environments has been an area of great interest and debate in recent years. Yet a significant gap in our understanding remains. Some authors have even advised us to “stop bitching about the gap” and start closing it (Hale and Borys, 2013a, p. 218). In this paper, we follow this call by investigating the relationship between safety rules as imagined, and enacted, in a rule-driven organization working in the oil and gas industry in Norway. Specifically, we investigate how three different sub-cultures within the organization: the management culture, the engineering culture, and the operations culture - make sense of safety rules at their respective levels, and why their interpretations of the gaps created by these same rules, are different. These differences lead to different levels of rule enactment. Using a case study approach, we found that how employees’ were engaged in the rule creation process led to different levels of psychological ownership, and this, in turn, led to different levels of rule enactment. We also found that these distinct occupational sub-cultures use different sensemaking approaches in understanding safety rules, and that the resultant differences in understanding directly affects both the understanding of the gap that exists between rules as imagined and rules as enacted, leading to different levels of rule compliance.

Local rulemaking, enforcement and compliance in state-owned forest commons

The literature on rule compliance is divided between those urging greater autonomy for stakeholders in rulemaking processes; and those arguing for increased enforcement. However recent experimental evidence highlights the potential for synergies between participatory rulemaking and enforcement. This paper therefore seeks to build upon these findings to explore the relationship between local rulemaking, local monitoring and compliance in field settings. The results which draw upon data about the behavior of 93 fuelwood user groups in state-owned forest commons in Asia, Africa and Latin America suggest that the average group is more likely to comply with rules when local rulemaking is combined with local monitoring. However, in some contexts it appears that local rulemaking in particular and other institutional arrangements in general may yield similar results.

Big Stick Management

Reentry correctional facilities play a critical role in preparing inmates to successfully transition back to the community. Part of this role includes providing a structured program, which allows for gradual transition from prison life to the community through work, education, and counseling programs. Little research reveals how correctional officers (COs) maintain control and promote rule compliance within a reentry environment. Using administrative, survey, and ethnographic data, we examine how COs in a reentry-focused prison manage the inmate population. Correctional officers do not report using misconducts in surveys and observations, but administrative data reveal staff often use formal misconducts even for minor infractions. The number of accumulated misconducts an inmate received, seriousness of the current violation, and officer tenure significantly relate to the severity of present misconduct outcomes. Considering the mission and goals of reentry facilities, this study has significant implications for the reentry process and inmate experience.

The ED-inpatient dashboard: Uniting emergency and inpatient clinicians to improve the efficiency and quality of care for patients requiring emergency admission to hospital.

Patients who require emergency admission to hospital require complex care that can be fragmented, occurring in the ED, across the ED-inpatient interface (EDii) and subsequently, in their destination inpatient ward. Our hospital had poor process efficiency with slow transit times for patients requiring emergency care. ED clinicians alone were able to improve the processes and length of stay for the patients discharged directly from the ED. However, improving the efficiency of care for patients requiring emergency admission to true inpatient wards required collaboration with reluctant inpatient clinicians. The inpatient teams were uninterested in improving time-based measures of care in isolation, but they were motivated by improving patient outcomes. We developed a dashboard showing process measures such as 4 h rule compliance rate coupled with clinically important outcome measures such as inpatient mortality. The EDii dashboard helped unite both ED and inpatient teams in clinical redesign to improve both efficiencies of care and patient outcomes.

False Assurances: The Effects of Corrosive Drinking Water and Noncompliance with Lead Control Policies in Flint, Michigan

Abstract Under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager, City of Flint residents were disconnected from the Detroit Water and Sewage Department (DWSD) and began drawing water from the Flint River for almost 18 months. This switch was met with opposition from residents who claimed that the water from the Flint River was unsafe. After concerns were confirmed by independent researchers and the Flint water crisis became a topic of national debate, City of Flint and state-level officials chose to switch back to the DWSD and vowed to repair the damage caused by regulatory neglect. In this article, I explore additional factors that might have contributed to the water crisis in Flint, namely the conditions of the plumbing within Flint Community Schools and the corrosive nature of the water before the water source switch in 2014. Based on evidence from City of Flint Water Department audits and recent Lead and Copper Rule compliance data from Flint Community Schools inspection reports, I found that the ch...

The Spectrum of Safety-Related Rule Violations

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.

Management Earnings Forecast Policies and the Cost of Equity Capital: Do Motives Matter?

I investigate whether managerial motivations for issuing management forecasts impact the relation between forecast policies and the cost of equity capital. Extant research on the relation between voluntary disclosure and the cost of equity capital assumes that management discloses information to credibly adjust investor expectations and, thus, lower cost of capital. My study is motivated by the low likelihood that all management forecasts yield the credible information underlying the beneficial effect on cost of equity capital. Drawing from the literature on management forecast incentives, I classify management forecast motivations other than cost of capital reduction into three categories: (1) compliance with exchange rules, (2) opportunism to benefit managerial self-interests, and (3) opportunism to benefit aligned managerial/existing shareholder interests. I find that, of firms that forecast, those with policies containing higher percentages of forecasts motivated by rule compliance, managerial opportunism, and aligned managerial/existing shareholder opportunism have higher cost of equity capital. Thus, evidence suggests that underlying forecast motivations impact the management earnings forecast policy-cost of equity capital relation.

The Rule of Law at Home and Abroad

The article addresses the meaning of the Rule of Law and its import between domestic and supra-State legalities, starting from problems raised by real cases, and the insufficiency of some received ideas or more common notions- from those requisites-based to formal, material, or procedural ones- to cope with them. Accordingly it focuses upon a “dual” structure of legality as an institutional condition for the Rule of Law to pursue its normative ideal. The “duality condition” for the Rule of law is historically and theoretically reconstructed in its origin and development, and the notion is carefully distinguished from rule compliance, procedural fairness, substantive justice, the principle of legality, and other different achievements of the present legal civilization. Its essential content shapes a separate, distinct identity vis a vis democracy and human rights, while it appears conducive to the appraisal of several problems related to the Rule of law oversight in diverse current circumstances.

Using police bicycle patrols to manage social order in bicycle and pedestrian traffic networks

This article examines how bicycle police units perceive their impact on social norms of rule compliance and risk behaviours in bicycle and pedestrian traffic networks. Using qualitative methods, a police bicycle patrol was analysed. Findings indicate that bicycle patrols are promising as an innovative measure to target bicycle and pedestrian traffic enforcement. Police reported that the bicycle patrol allowed increased accessibility and that police presence on bicycles had a positive normative impact on the behaviours of bike riders and pedestrians. The discussion encompasses the way in which bicycle patrol units hold important tacit knowledge of street life that could play a key role in policy making.

Evaluation of an ethical method aimed at improving hygiene rules compliance in dental practice

The objective of this study is to determine the efficiency of an ethical method, based on a thought experiment in ethics, on hygiene rules compliance for dental health care team members. This is a prospective study that assesses hygiene compliance in dental practice before and after a thought experiment in ethics, using 2 questionnaires. Participants included 130 clinician students in dentistry at Strasbourg University Hospital, France. The results emphasize a better implementation of hygiene rules after the thought experiment in ethics, when comparing the relative frequencies of completed hygiene items. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test shows significant differences between the first questionnaire and the second one after the thought experiment in ethics (P < .001). This ethical method provides efficiency on hygiene rules compliance, which makes it beneficial to implement. However, far from being an absolute unit method, this thought experiment in ethics appears to be an original, supplemental, and complementary method.

Burdens of non-conformity: Motor execution reveals cognitive conflict during deliberate rule violations

Rule compliance is pivotal for the regulation of social behavior. Still, humans deliberately violate rules at times – be it for personal reasons or for a higher good. Whereas previous research has studied the preconditions and consequences of rule violations, essentially nothing is known about the cognitive processes right at the moment a rule violation takes place. Here we show that merely labeling an action as rule violation induces substantial conflict between rule violation and compliance, as revealed by participants’ bias towards rule-complying motor actions. Moreover, conflict that comes with violating a rule was much stronger than conflict that comes with following an alternative rule, even if both decisions result in the same observable behavior. These observations open a new theoretical perspective on rule violation behavior, shifting the focus toward the cognitive processes operating during the very act of rule violation.

Anger and enforcement

Observers who are angered by rule violations and punish violators often play a critical role in enforcement. Hence a key question is: when will noncompliance provoke anger, and when will it be excused? This paper develops a theory of rule compliance as the outcome of a two-person Bayesian game. The core of the model is its description of what constitutes an excuse. Noncompliance is excused when a “reasonable person” in similar circumstances would also have failed to comply. Phenomena explained include the role of “legitimacy” in enforcement; corruption traps; graduated sanctions for repeat offenders; and tolerance of self-interestedness in markets.

The social foundations of airport security

Aviation security relies on the assumption that risks can be mitigated through rule compliance. To assure this, the operational design and logistical process has fashioned airports into mass production organizations where human behaviors – of both employees and passengers – are defined within a rational and logical framework. However, recent empirical evidence raises some critical issues as to the very basis of these assumptions. Employing the analysis of data obtained from 8 airports across Europe by ethnographic, field survey questionnaires, interviews and a cohort panel study, it is clear that bending and breaking the rules is fairly commonplace; most threats are assessed as false alarms; security decisions are predominantly group decisions; co-workers and friends influence rule compliance and passengers are active participants in security decisions. These behaviors certainly do not fit neatly into the classical model of airport design and operations. We will therefore argue – on the basis of the data generated from these methodologies - that the classical aviation security model should be extended to take into account the reality of human behavior of both passengers and employees in the security process. This approach emphasizes the social content within which security decisions are made, namely that airports, as complex social organizations, are composed of both formal administrative and informal social network structures. Organizational behaviors within these social contexts foster how security decisions are made and the degree they are rule compliant. We therefore expand the basic security model but give it added value by reflecting the reality of human behavior within an airports organizational context.

Bridging the hierarchical and collaborative divide: the role of network managers in scaling up a network approach to water governance in California

Network governance represents an important approach to managing complex environmental challenges because of its capacity to support learning. However, multi-scalar problems often require networks to interface with hierarchical modes of governance. This paper examines how network managers can help mediate the potentially constraining influence of external demands on a network’s capacity for learning. It finds that a trusted lead agency can help bridge the hierarchical and collaborative divide by brokering across regional and state-level interests, developing processes that transform external requirements into learning opportunities, and supporting the development of informal dynamics in addition to formal rule compliance.

고등학생의 아침식사 섭취빈도와 전반적인 학교생활 인식도와의 관련성

용인시에 위치한 고등학교에 재학 중인 남녀 고등학생 301명을 대상으로 아침식사의 섭취빈도(주당 0~2회, 3~6회 및 7회)와 전반적인 학교생활(신체활동, 교사 및 교우관계, 규칙준수, 학습태도, 학업성적, 전반적인 학교생활)과의 관련성을 살펴보았다. 본 연구 결과를 요약하면 다음과 같다. 아침식사 섭취빈도에 따른 신체활동 영향에 대한 인식도는 남학생(65.1%)에 비해 여학생(77.4%)이 높았다. 아침식사 섭취빈도에 따른 규칙준수에의 영향 인식도는 여학생이 유의적인 차이를 보인 반면(P0.01), 남학생은 유의적인 차이가 없었다. 학습태도에 대한 인식도는 ‘영향을 준다’고 응답한 비율이 남학생과 여학생에서 24.0%와 44.5%로 각각 나타났다. 아침식사 섭취빈도에 따른 학업성적에 대한 인식도는 여학생의 경우 유의적인 차이를 보인 반면(0~2회 섭취군 37.5%, 3~6회 섭취군 30.4%, 7회 섭취군 52.2%)(P0.05), 남학생은 유의적인 차이가 없었다. 전반적인 학교생활에 대한 인식도는 남학생(P0.05)과 여학생(P0.01) 모두에서 아침식사 섭취빈도에 따라 유의적인 차이를 나타냈다. 아침식사 섭취빈도와 전반적인 학교생활 간의 상관분석에서 남학생은 아침식사 섭취빈도가 높을수록 전반적인 학교생활에 대한 인식도(+0.185)(P0.05)가 가장 높았으며, 교사관계(+0.168)(P0.05), 학습태도 연관성 인식도(+0.116), 교우관계(+0.049), 학업성적(+0.029) 순으로 나타났다. 반면 여학생은 아침식사 섭취빈도가 높을수록 전반적인 학교생활에 대한 인식도(+0.323)(P0.01)가 가장 높았으며, 규칙준수(+0.316)(P0.01), 학습태도 연관성 인식도(+0.267) (P0.01), 교우관계(+0.215)(P0.01), 학업성적 연관성 인식도(+0.152), 교사관계(+0.112), 학습태도(+0.118), 학업성적(+0.065) 순으로 나타났다. 본 연구에서 고등학생의 아침결식은 학교생활에서의 신체활동을 비롯하여 학습태도, 학업성적, 교사 및 교우관계 등의 전반적인 학교생활과 관련이 있는 것으로 나타났으므로 아침결식 해결을 위한 국가차원의 아침급식프로그램의 개발 및 학생 및 부모를 대상으로 한 적극적이고 효율적인 영양교육의 실시가 요구된다.

The impact of time at work and time off from work on rule compliance: the case of hand hygiene in health care.

To deliver high-quality, reliable, and consistent services safely, organizations develop professional standards. Despite the communication and reinforcement of these standards, they are often not followed consistently. Although previous research suggests that high job demands are associated with declines in compliance over lengthy intervals, we hypothesized-drawing on theoretical arguments focused on fatigue and depletion-that the impact of job demands on routine compliance with professional standards might accumulate much more quickly. To test this hypothesis, we studied a problem that represents one of the most significant compliance challenges in health care today: hand hygiene. Using longitudinal field observations of over 4,157 caregivers working in 35 different hospitals and experiencing more than 13.7 million hand hygiene opportunities, we found that hand hygiene compliance rates dropped by a regression-estimated 8.7 percentage points on average from the beginning to the end of a typical 12-hr work shift. This decline in compliance was magnified by increased work intensity. Further, longer breaks between work shifts increased subsequent compliance rates, and such benefits were greater for individuals when they had ended their preceding shift with a lower compliance rate. In addition, (a) the decline in compliance over the course of a work shift and (b) the improvement in compliance following a longer break increased as individuals accumulated more total work hours the preceding week. The implications of these findings for patient safety and job design are discussed.

Meet NCAA rules‐compliance standards by implementing 5 steps for DI head coaches

Division I head coaches have the responsibility to promote an atmosphere of National Collegiate Athletic Association rules compliance within their program, as well as to monitor staff activities to ensure their compliance with NCAA legislation.

The impacts of deterrence, social norms and legitimacy on forest rule compliance in Ghana

Compliance is one of the central, but often overlooked challenges that actors face as they seek to devise and implement environmental policies. Therefore this paper draws upon multiple models of rule compliance to assess the factors influencing compliance in the high forest zone of Ghana. Specifically, the paper considers whether compliance with formal laws that prohibit the felling of timber trees, farming in forest reserves and the use of fire to clear land is explained by perceptions of government enforcement, social norms and/or the perceived legitimacy of rules and government officials while controlling for a number of potentially intervening factors, and each other. The results indicate that compliance is affected by deterrence, social norms, and the perceived fairness of laws; but more importantly it demonstrates that the factors affecting compliance vary across the three studied rules. Whereas compliance with the tree-felling rule is driven by government enforcement; compliance with the fire and farming rules appears to be linked to social norms and the fairness of rules. Given that levels of compliance are considerably higher for the bushfire and farming rules; we conclude by suggesting greater attention on the normative aspects of the compliance decision, and legal reforms that might align legislation with the social norms and practices of local users.