The influence of organizational factors on safety in Taiwanese high-risk industries

Organizational theorists have recently begun to pay research attention to the workforces of emerging countries in Asia, especially the greater China regions. However, little research has focused on the influence of organizational factors on safety in these countries. This study hypothesized that organizational factors, characterized as safety leadership perspective (management commitment, blame culture) and safety climate perspective (harmonious relationships), would influence group-level safety management, which would in turn influence individual level safety awareness and practices. To test this hypothesis, a safety climate questionnaire was distributed to ten Taiwanese plants in high-risk industries. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to analyze the linkages among organizational level factors, work-group-level factors, and workers’ safety awareness and practices. We found that safety leadership style and organizational harmony in Taiwanese high-risk industries can exert significant influences on work-group processes, which in turn have greater effects on individual safety awareness and practices. These findings and implications can serve as a basis for safety improvement in areas of the greater China region.     

An Empirical Investigation of the Influence of Safety Climate on Organizational Citizenship Behavior in Taiwan’s Facilities

Although the social exchange relationships between employers and employees are increasingly important to the performance of safety management systems, the psychological effects of work attitudes on this relationship have been less studied. Using a sample of first-line operators and their supervisors from 188 facilities in Taiwan which had Occupational Health and Safety Assessment Series 18000 (OHSAS 18000) certification, the current research conducted an empirical investigation of the influence of safety climate on organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Work attitude was used to disclose the psychological effect. Research results indicated that (a) safety climate was a significant predicator of OCB, (b) the psychological effect significantly influenced social exchange relationships, and (c) job satisfaction showed a stronger mediating influence than organizational commitment due to the frequent top management turnover. Discussions and implications are also addressed.     

An empirical investigation of the influence of safety climate on organizational citizenship behavior in Taiwan's facilities.

Although the social exchange relationships between employers and employees are increasingly important to the performance of safety management systems, the psychological effects of work attitudes on this relationship have been less studied. Using a sample of first-line operators and their supervisors from 188 facilities in Taiwan which had Occupational Health and Safety Assessment Series 18000 (OHSAS 18000) certification, the current research conducted an empirical investigation of the influence of safety climate on organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Work attitude was used to disclose the psychological effect. Research results indicated that (a) safety climate was a significant predicator of OCB, (b) the psychological effect significantly influenced social exchange relationships, and (c) job satisfaction showed a stronger mediating influence than organizational commitment due to the frequent top management turnover. Discussions and implications are also addressed.     

Safety management in different high-risk domains – All the same?

In view of safety management being introduced in more and more industries, the aim of this paper is to discuss what different high-risk industries can learn from each other and what limits for generalizing safety management methods within and across industries exist. After presenting core components of safety management, three attributes crucial to any organization’s functioning are described, which also affect the way safety management systems should be designed, run, and assessed. These attributes are (1) the kinds of safety to be managed, (2) the general approach to managing uncertainty as a hallmark of organizations that manage safety, and (3) the regulatory regime within which safety is managed. By discussing safety management in the context of these three attributes, contingencies are outlined that can help decision-makers in companies to tailor safety management to their own situation and support regulators in drawing up and evaluating safety management requirements for different industries while also promoting learning between different high-risk domains. Standards and procedures, safety training, incident reporting and investigation, and safety culture are taken as examples to illustrate why and how different aspects of organizational functioning should be taken into account when designing and evaluating safety management systems or elements thereof.     

An adaptive management system for hazardous technology organizations

This paper introduces a management system suitable for hazardous technology organizations which has been developed based on the assumptions that in these organizations safety is a critical strategic factor, the existence of an enhanced safety culture is a crucial condition for safety and that safety culture enhancement implies in organizational changes. The management system was theoretically developed and then implemented at a Brazilian nuclear research and development installation, as a case study, in order to validate the theoretical propositions assumed in the system development. The developed management system comprises a day-to-day based organizational framework which treats safety as one of the organization strategic perspectives and provides a continuous adaptation of the complex causal inter-relationships which occur between the implementation of new management practices – designed and implemented according to the requirements of the criteria of excellence of the Brazilian quality award management assessment model – and the organization safety culture. The results achieved in the case study permitted to demonstrate the validness of all the system theoretical propositions and to conclude that the continuous and systematic operation of the management system makes an effective safety culture enhancement possible and simultaneously facilitates that the new management practices be effectively implemented, thus making continuous organizational improvement possible.     

Antecedents of organizational and community embeddedness: The roles of support,psychological safety,and need to belong

Defining embeddedness as a psychological construct that influences individuals to stay, we draw on conservation of resources theory to develop and test a model of the influence of contextual social support resources on both organizational and community forms of embeddedness. In addition to the direct relationship between support and embeddedness, we also assess the mediating influence of organizational and community psychological safety and the moderating impact of need to belong. Using a multisource sample of employees and coworkers (N = 165), we found support for most of the hypotheses. Social support resources emanating from the organization and the community were positively associated with embeddedness in each domain, and psychological safety mediated these relationships. We also found that need to belong was an important boundary condition in the determination of organizational embeddedness. We discuss the theoretical contributions and practical implications of our findings.     

不同类型压力对飞行员安全绩效的影响规律研究

为探究各类型压力对飞行员安全绩效的影响规律，为飞行员日常工作管理提供依据，选取某航空公司200名飞行员进行压力测试，并调取其近6 a的飞机品质(QAR)数据，通过相关性分析和线性回归分析将飞行员压力数据与其QAR数据进行对比分析，探究飞行员压力对飞行安全绩效的影响规律。研究结果表明:工作负荷压力、家庭压力、人际关系压力和组织管理压力会显著负向影响飞行员安全绩效；角色压力和专业发展压力会显著正向影响飞行员安全绩效。     

Assessing the maintenance unit of a nuclear power plant – identifying the cultural conceptions concerning the maintenance work and the maintenance organization

Various organizational accidents have indicated that the shared interpretations and experiences of the personnel concerning the work, the organization, and the associated risks are of crucial importance for the safety and effectiveness of the operations. These conceptions are an element of the organizational culture. The cultural conceptions should thus be studied and their contribution to the organizational safety and effectiveness should be assessed proactively. Nevertheless, organizational assessments often focus on either the general safety attitudes and/or values of the personnel, or formal organizational structures and the official practices. In this article a case study is reported that was carried out in a Nordic nuclear power plant maintenance unit. We will illustrate how the employees in the organization construct their work, their organization and the demands of the maintenance task. We focus on explicating and assessing the cultural conceptions prevalent in the maintenance organization. Our aim is to illustrate how the cultural conceptions and organizational practices, tools and the organizing of the work and the organizational climate influence each other, and how they relate to the demands of the maintenance work. The principal methods utilized in the case study were organizational culture questionnaire (CULTURE), semi-structured interviews, group working, and personnel development seminars.     

The effect of organizational justice as perceived by occupational drivers on traffic accidents: Mediating effects of job satisfaction

Introduction: Considerable research supports a positive association between the safety climate (which is a direct organizational factor) and safety performance (such as safe driving). However, indirect organizational variables that influence safe driving have gone largely unexplored. This study contributes to safety research by examining the relationship between organizational justice, which is a distal organizational factor, and traffic accidents and the mediating role of job satisfaction. Method: 233 occupational drivers employed by taxi and bus companies in South Korea participated in the study. Regression analysis was conducted using police records on participants' on-the-job traffic accidents. Results: The analysis shows that the mediation model is statistically significant. That is, drivers with a lower level of perceived organizational justice showed a higher frequency of traffic accidents, and the mediating effect of job satisfaction was also significant. Based on the results, implications and limitations are discussed. Practical applications: The findings demonstrate that in order to decrease traffic accidents, transportation companies would benefit by examining distal factors such as organizational justice. This approach suggests that the conventional framework for safety management should be broadened to include aspects of the entire organization.     

Incorporating organizational factors into probabilistic risk assessment of complex socio-technical systems: Principles and theoretical foundations

The current generation of Probabilistic Risk Analysis (PRA), particularly those for technical systems, does not include an explicit representation of the possible impacts of organization and management on the safety performance of equipment and personnel. There are a number of technical challenges in developing a predictive model of organizational safety performance. There is a need for a widely accepted and theoretically sound set of principles on which models of organizational influences could be developed and validated. As a result of a multidisciplinary effort, this paper explores the feasibility of developing such principles and proposes a set of principles for organizational safety risk analysis. Then, as a realization of the proposed modeling principles, a safety risk framework, named Socio-Technical Risk Analysis (SoTeRiA), is developed. SoTeRiA formally integrates the technical system risk models with the social (safety culture and safety climate) and structural (safety practices) aspects of safety prediction models, and provides a theoretical basis for the integration. A systematic view of safety culture and safety climate leaves an important gap in modeling complex system safety risk, and SoTeRiA, describing the relationship between these two concepts, bridges this gap. The framework explicitly recognizes the relationship among constructs at multiple levels of analysis, and extends the PRA framework to include the effects of organizational factors in a more comprehensive and defensible way.     

Multi-level safety climate associations with safety behaviors in the fire service

Introduction: Limited research associated with safety climate has been completed within the fire service. Given this dearth of information, the present study sought to identify a valid and reliable measure of safety climate at both the workgroup and organizational levels within the fire service. Methods: Researchers surveyed 994 firefighters in two large metropolitan fire departments. Preliminary analyses including psychometrics, confirmatory factor analyses, and shared perception analyses were completed. A linear mixed model analysis was then completed to assess the relationships between workgroup safety climate, organizational safety climate, and safety behaviors, including both safety compliance and safety citizenship behaviors. Results: Measures of safety climate at the workgroup (WGSC) and organizational levels (OSC) were derived. WGSC factors include supervisor support (α = 0.92), vertical cohesion (α = 0.89), and horizontal cohesion (α = 0.94). OSC factors include management commitment (α = 0.91), safety programs/policies (α = 0.89), perceived fairness (α = 0.86) and incident command (α = 0.90). Confirmatory factor analyses confirmed our multi-factor models were a good fit to the data. The linear mixed model analysis found that WGSC positively predicted safety compliance behavior (B = 0.13, p < .001) and safety citizenship behavior (B = 0.22, p < .001) and OSC positively predicted safety compliance behavior (B = 0.16, p < .001) and safety citizenship behavior (B = 0.15, p < .001). Conclusions: This work presents reliable and valid measures of both workgroup and organizational safety climate, which have positive relationships with safety behavior outcomes. Practical application: The measures, which were developed through an extensive multi-method process, provide a means for researchers and practitioners to assess safety climate in the fire service and provides guidance for future safety climate research, including informing intervention research, which could potentially bolster safety climate and enhance safety in the fire service.     

杜邦与国内企业安全管理组织结构模式对比研究

通过研究各种安全管理组织结构模式对企业安全绩效的影响,旨在找到减少伤亡率的适合于企业的安全管理组织结构模式。首先从理论上分析了杜邦各时期的安全管理组织结构模式,并把我国的安全管理组织结构模式与之对比,发现我国现存的安全管理组织结构模式严重抑制了员工在安全工作中积极主动性的发挥。然后用熵模型理论验证了我国集权式的安全管理组织结构模式在安全信息流通的时效性和准确性方面比杜邦采用的集权与分权相结合的组织结构模相比有较大差距。笔者认为,我国在安全管理组织结构的设计方面应采用分散与集中相结合模式的结论。     

Safety culture in Swedish air traffic control

European air traffic control is undergoing changes in organization and technology in order to increase efficiency in air traffic. Change processes can have a negative impact on existing safety cultures, the foundations of safety work, and on safety. This paper reports on an assessment of safety culture at one administrative and two operative units in a Swedish air traffic control setting, using questionnaire packages and interviews, and focuses on 391 questionnaire respondents. The objectives of the study were to obtain baseline data of safety culture aspects and relationships between safety culture and organizational climate before major organizational and technical changes were implemented, and to yield reference data on safety culture aspects in this transport branch. The safety culture aspects were generally perceived and judged to be good by the respondents. Relationships were identified between the organizational climate and the safety culture at the two operative units, where a higher level of Support for ideas and a lower level of Conflicts were positively related to many of the investigated safety culture aspects. The general safety culture in the air traffic control setting was found to be on a somewhat higher average score level than that found in the authors’ previous studies of passenger shipping and airport ground handling.     

基于模糊层次分析法的组织因素影响度识别

基于模糊层次分析理论,构建影响系统安全的组织因素模型,确定影响系统安全的组织因素指标体系,利用因素相对影响度R、因素总体影响度C和因素重要度I来表征组织因素对系统安全的影响程度。采用该因素影响度方法分析了组织因素对某核电站系统安全的影响,发现监督、安全文化培训、领导对安全的态度、程序的完备性、部门间的交流与反馈、协调、个人的意识和态度、岗前技能培训、部门内的交流与反馈是对核电站运行安全影响最大的组织因素。     

组织管理失误对操作人员行为安全影响分析

为使操作人员行为更安全,对组织管理失误进行分析,归纳为管理控制失误、组 织规程失误、组织安全管理失误、安全监督失误、教育培训不足5个方面,运用结构方 程模型（SEM）分析对操作人员行为安全的影响,使用AMOS软件对模型求解。运用直觉 三角模糊数对模型中指标进行评价并采用TOPSIS法对不安全行为进行排序。研究表明: 管理控制和组织规程对建立安全监督体系有正向作用;管理控制和组织规程对组织安全 管理实施有正向作用;管理控制和组织规程对有教育培训正向作用;建立安全监督体系 、组织安全管理实施和教育培训对操作人员安全行为有正向作用。进行风险排序有利于 企业对关键工种提出改进措施,提高企业效益。     

Measuring and analyzing adaptive capacity at management levels of resilient systems

Resilience engineering (RE) is capable of handling disruptive events and controlling their consequences in process industries such as petrochemical plants. This study aims at analyzing the level of adaptive capacity and identifying effective factors on developing adaptive capacity in the organizational structure of process industries. The data of this study were obtained through direct observation and a structured questionnaire in a petrochemical plant. Managers at all levels participated in the survey. Data envelopment analysis (DEA), which is a mathematical approach, was used to compute and analyze the role of the factors contributing to adaptive capacity. The results indicated that reporting safety issues played a central role in enhancing adaptive capacity at all management levels. Both middle management and low-level management emphasized the importance of management commitment, whereas top-level management considered flexibility as a vital factor in managing disruptions and reducing accidents. The findings of this study could be useful for managers and other decision-makers to improve safety in process industries.     

With a little help from my colleagues: A social embeddedness approach to perceived organizational support

We examined the role of social embeddedness in creating positive perceptions of organizational support among managerial and staff employees (n = 72) of a large manufacturing firm. We operationalized social embeddedness as the size, density, and quality of employees' networks of multiplex, reciprocated exchange relationships with colleagues. After controlling for support from supervisors and upper management, we found all three aspects of social embeddedness to be associated with perceived organizational support (POS). This research suggests that in addition to the top‐down influence of the organizational hierarchy, POS results from the organizational community within which employees are embedded through their social network in the workplace. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

煤矿企业安全文化影响因素的实证研究

煤矿企业安全文化以煤矿企业安全观念为核心,安全制度、安全行为与安全物态围绕安全观念相互影响交错融合,研究员工安全需要、安全意识、社会安全价值观、沟通系统、社会安全需要、教育培训系统、安全事故、行业特点、国家安全法规、管理参与、奖惩系统、组织承诺、生产力发展水平、社会经济文化等因素对煤矿企业安全文化系统的关系,结果表明,除员工授权外,其他因素对煤矿企业安全文化系统都有一定的影响,从而提出相应的政策建议。     

不良安全文化的特征:事故报告再分析

通过对高风险组织安全管理及事故的研究,对事故报告进行文化意义上的编码分析,揭示导致事故发生的不良安全文化特征。该报告再分析的材料是厂内档案可查的事故报告61份,根据其中55份事故报告的专家编码分析结果,得到了不良安全文化的特征是较低水平的管理对安全的承诺、较差的安全遵守、缺乏应急管理的有效措施、沟通与协调障碍。通过聚类分析,安全文化的各因素可以进一步归为两大类安全促进因素与安全保健因素。从文化的角度来看,分别对应着对组织的承诺和对人的承诺两个维度。     

Reporting practices in merchant shipping,and the identification of influencing factors

The objective of this paper is to identify the factors determining the reporting frequency of experience data e.g. incidents and accidents. The empirical setting is the Norwegian controlled merchant fleet. Data were collected from a survey carried out in 2006, where 1262 questionnaires were gathered from 76 vessels. The data were subjected to explorative factor analysis, method of principal component and varimax rotation. Seven factors, representing latent dimensions of safety culture, were extracted. Internal consistency (Cronbach Alpha) and scale reliability were found to be acceptable. The factor scores were used in an ordered logistic regression to examine the factors’ relationships to reporting frequency. The results show that enhanced safety related training, a trusting and open relationship among the crew, safety oriented ship management, performance of pro-active risk identification activities and feedback on reported events all are significantly related to higher reporting frequency. On the other hand, demand for efficiency and lack of attention to safety from shore personnel, are significantly related to lower reporting frequency. The results also show a significantly lower reporting frequency among those who have worked with their local manager less than 1 year. Bulk and dry cargo vessels also show significantly lower reporting frequency than those working on liquid bulk carriers.