Safety-critical Organizations Research Articles

A Systemic Approach to Organizational Safety Modeling and Analysis

The structural and behavioral complexity of modern safety-critical organizations, such as incident management organizations, air navigation service providers, power plants, increases with every passing year. Such organizations are characterized by nonlinear dynamics involving many interrelated actors and processes. Safety issues that emerge from these complex dynamics remain increasingly hidden, until an incident or even a serious accident occurs. Traditional safety analysis methods developed long ago for much simpler organizations cannot help identifying, explaining and predicting many safety-related properties of modern organizations. To address this issue, in the paper a formal approach is proposed to establish relations between local dynamics of actors of a complex safety-critical organization and global safety-related properties that emerge from these dynamics. In contrast to the traditional approaches the organizational dynamics are specified by taking the agent perspective with an organizational layer. The approach is illustrated by a simulation case study, in which spread of safety-critical information in an air navigation service provider is investigated.

Authentic leadership and its relationship with risk perception and safety climate

PurposeThis study aims to examine how authentic leadership relates to risk perception in safety critical organizations (SCOs). It is hypothesized that authentic leaders influence risk perception through the mediating effect of safety climate.Design/methodology/approachUsing a survey design, the variables were assessed in a cross‐sectional sample of 293 offshore oil installation workers from a single company.FindingsThe authors’ findings show that follower ratings of authentic leadership are negatively related to risk perception and positively associated with ratings of safety climate. Controlling for personality characteristics and leadership responsibility among respondents, the results confirm the hypothesis in that safety climate mediates the relationship between authentic leadership and risk perception. Safety climate had the strongest relationship with risk perception when assessed as a higher order construct.Originality/valueThis study is one of the first to investigate the relationship between authentic leadership and safety. The results indicate that authentic leadership and safety climate are important factors that relate to risk perception in SCOs. The authors’ findings suggest that SCOs should consider recruiting and developing authentic leaders to foster positive safety climates and risk management.

Leading indicators of system safety – Monitoring and driving the organizational safety potential

An indicator can be considered any measure – quantitative or qualitative – that seeks to produce information on an issue of interest. Safety indicators can play a key role in providing information on organizational performance, motivating people to work on safety and increasing organizational potential for safety. We will describe the challenges of monitoring and driving system safety. Currently, the same lead indicators are used – explicitly or implicitly – for both purposes. The fact that the selection and use of safety performance indicators is always based on a certain understanding (a model) of the sociotechnical system and safety is often forgotten. We present a theoretical framework for utilizing safety performance indicators in safety–critical organizations that incorporates three types of safety performance indicators – outcome, monitor and drive indicators. We provide examples of each type of indicator and discuss the application of the framework in organizational safety management. We argue that outcome indicators are lag indicators since outcomes always follow something; they are the consequences arising from multiple other situational and contextual factors. Monitor and drive indicators are lead indicators. The main function of the drive indicators is to direct the sociotechnical activity in the organization by motivating certain safety-related activities. Monitor indicators provide a view on the dynamics of the organization: the practices, abilities, skills and motivation of the personnel – the organizational potential for safety. We conclude that organizations should better acknowledge the significance of monitor and drive indicators in safety management.

Leadership, psychological capital and safety research: Conceptual issues and future research questions

In this theory-driven literature review we examine how leadership and emerging research in positive organizational behaviour (POB) may inform our understanding of human mechanisms that affect safety outcomes. According to authentic leadership theory, leader self-awareness and self-regulation processes are vital mechanisms in the leader–follower exchange. From emerging research on authentic leadership, we propose that production management values, attitudes, and behaviour are linked to safety climate and safety outcomes in safety critical organizations (SCOs). According to recent developments in management theory, “psychological capital” is comprised of four distinct aspects that can be linked to desirable organizational outcomes and sustained high quality performance in individual workers. From this we offer a research model and five research propositions implicating that authentic leadership directly affects safety outcomes via promoting positive safety climate perceptions. Furthermore, we propose a second path where psychological capital mediates the relationship between authentic leadership, safety climate and safety outcomes in SCOs.

Using the Job Demands–Resources model to investigate risk perception, safety climate and job satisfaction in safety critical organizations

Using the Job Demands-Resources model (JD-R) as a theoretical framework, this study investigated the relationship between risk perception as a job demand and psychological safety climate as a job resource with regard to job satisfaction in safety critical organizations. In line with the JD-R model, it was hypothesized that high levels of risk perception is related to low job satisfaction and that a positive perception of safety climate is related to high job satisfaction. In addition, it was hypothesized that safety climate moderates the relationship between risk perception and job satisfaction. Using a sample of Norwegian offshore workers (N = 986), all three hypotheses were supported. In summary, workers who perceived high levels of risk reported lower levels of job satisfaction, whereas this effect diminished when workers perceived their safety climate as positive. Follow-up analyses revealed that this interaction was dependent on the type of risks in question. The results of this study supports the JD-R model, and provides further evidence for relationships between safety-related concepts and work-related outcomes indicating that organizations should not only develop and implement sound safety procedures to reduce the effects of risks and hazards on workers, but can also enhance other areas of organizational life through a focus on safety.

Violations-Inducing Framing Effects of Production Goals: Conditions under which goal setting leads to neglecting safety-relevant rules

Violations are a problem for safety-critical organizations, which need to trust in their workers' compliance with rules and regulations. In two studies we investigate the impact of the framing of production outcome goals. The first study was designed in accordance with the classic framing experiments by Kahneman and Tversky (1983) as a paper-based case with two groups ( N=72) reading a story in which they are to envisage themselves in the position of the production supervisor, who decides to comply with or violate a safety-relevant rule in order to meet the production goal. The two groups differ in the framing of the production outcome goals in terms of losses or gains. In contrast to our assumptions and to previous findings, we were unable to replicate the framing effect for a production setting, but 35–45% of participants in both groups were willing to violate the normative rule, independently of the framing. In the second experiment ( N = 39), the experimental groups acted out the role of the supervisor and were trained to use two different start-up strategies for the plant. In the final trial, participants were told that their salary would depend on their performance in this last trial. As a result, in the loss framing conditions, significantly more participants violated the normative rule than in the gain framing condition. Finally, we discuss the implications of framing effects for production settings and their impact on the probability of choosing to violate normative rules.

A critical view of severity classification in risk assessment methods

The knowledge of operational experts plays a fundamental role in performing safety assessments in safety critical organizations. The complexity and socio-technical nature of such systems produce hazardous situations which require a thorough understanding of concrete operational scenarios and cannot be anticipated by simply analysing single failures of specific functions. This paper addresses some limitations regarding state-of-the-art safety assessment techniques, with special reference to the adoption of “chain of event” models in accident causation (widely criticised by many authors), to the use of severity classes and to the adoption of the worst credible effect criterion. Such methods tend to assume a linear link between single hazards considered in isolation and corresponding consequences for safety, thus neglecting the intrinsic complexity of the systems under analysis and reducing the opportunities for an effective involvement of operational experts. An alternative approach is proposed to overcome these limitations, by distinguishing different typologies of hazards and integrating the analysis of single functions with the study of concrete operational scenarios.

Understanding maintenance work in safety-critical organisations – managing the performance variability

Human and organisational performance variability has been identified as a cause of many latent and active failures in maintenance. Seldom has the variability been considered as an integral and inherent part of the maintenance activity to be managed by organisational means. The article deals with the challenge of understanding maintenance work in safety-critical organisations. The aim is to review the current literature on maintenance work and illustrate the organisational research challenges of managing performance variability in maintenance. This article presents six major research challenges in managing performance variability in maintenance. The article concludes by noting that a holistic theory on maintenance work is needed to manage the variability and turn it into a positive force. Maintenance has the potential to produce positive performance variability and guard against negative instability in complex sociotechnical systems.

Managing emergencies and abnormal situations in air traffic control (part II): Teamwork strategies

Team performance has been studied in many safety-critical organizations including aviation, nuclear power plant, offshore oil platforms and health organizations. This study looks into teamwork strategies that air traffic controllers employ to manage emergencies and abnormal situations. Two field studies were carried out in the form of observations of simulator training in emergency and unusual scenarios of novices and experienced controllers. Teamwork strategies covered aspects of team orientation and coordination, information exchange, change management and error handling. Several performance metrics were used to rate the efficiency of teamwork and test the construct validity of a prototype model of teamwork. This is a companion study to an earlier investigation of taskwork strategies in the same field (part I) and contributes to the development of a generic model for Taskwork and Teamwork strategies in Emergencies in Air traffic Management (T 2EAM). Suggestions are made on how to use T 2EAM to develop training programs, assess team performance and improve mishap investigations.