Organizational safety

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Organizational safety is a contemporary discipline of study and research developed from the works of James Reason, creator of the Swiss cheese model, and Charles Perrow author of Normal Accidents. These scholars demonstrated the complexity and system coupling inherent in organizations, created by multiple process and various people working simultaneously to achieve organizational objectives, is responsible for errors ranging from small to catastrophic system failures. The discipline crosses professions, spans industries, and involves multiple academic domains. As such, the literature is disjointed and the associated research outcomes vary by study setting. This page provides a comprehensive yet concise summary of safety and accidents organizational knowledge using internal links (to existing Wikipedia pages), external links (to sources outside of Wikipedia), and seminal literature citations.

Contents

Organizational Culture and Climate

Organizational culture emerged from organizational studies and management to describe the attitudes, perceptions, beliefs and values of an organization. Organizational culture is the established underlying suppositions (Ashkanasy, Broadfoot, & Falkus, 2000; Schein, 1991; Strauss, 1987) communicated through shared, collectively supported, perceptions (Schneider, Brief, & Guzzo, 1996) that ultimately manifest in organizational outputs (Ashkanasy et al., 2000; Schein, 1991; Strauss, 1987). More basic, organizational culture has been described as "the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization." [1]

To take a slightly broader view, it is necessary to consider the topic of organisational safety in the context of change management. An eminent example of a book in this category, discussing the topic of organisational culture, is The Change Masters". [2] Rosabeth Moss Kanter notes in the chapter 2 of the book that change should be seen as opportunity rather than see it as a threat. Seen in this way, organisations can be analysed as systems tending towards open or closed systems as they are conceived in the field of social science. The classification of systems using these two categories allows analogies to be made using the framework of general systems theory. The Open and closed system in social science provides further details on the topic of communications between people which can be treated as a closed communication system. Rosabeth Moss Kanter noted that culture of segmentalism inhibits innovation as segmentalism treats change as a threat and integrated companies encourage innovation as they treat change as an opportunity.

Analyzing organisations or its culture must take into account the concept of system consisting of elements. As a system, an organisation is a purposeful system that contains at least two purposeful elements which have a common purpose. But, unlike, technical systems, organisations can consist of elements that can display will and learn to adapt. Organisations, unlike organisms forming part of the organisation, cannot learn but adapt to changing situations. Organisms, unlike organisations, are made up of elements that are not purposeful in any way. The elements of an organisms are functional in nature, but the purpose is only revealed by the whole. At least one of the elements of organisation must have a system control function to guide the organisation towards variety increasing rather than variety decreasing ( e.g. ineffective committee) as unlike the organisms, the will can be displayed only by parts or its elements. [3] The dynamics of decision making within an organisation decide the course of action taken by an organisation. Research results highlight the risks of ignoring the role of disequilibrium dynamics and bounded rationality in shaping competitive outcomes, and demonstrate how both can be incorporated into strategic analysis to form a dynamic behavioural theory amenable to rigorous analysis. [4]

The idea that too much reliance should not be placed on tool supported decision making was discussed by Robert Freeman in a 1980s article, "Taking the Bugs Out of Computer Spreadsheets". In it, Freeman discusses a case of a Dallas-based oil gas company losing millions of dollars in the acquisition deal. The question of reliability of the computer spreadsheets studied by Robert Freeman suggests that logic of models and the makeup underlying the spreadsheets must be thoroughly checked. [5]

The UK HSE Research Report 367 presents a review of safety culture and safety climate literature for the development of the safety culture inspection toolkit. [6]

The key issue in the organisational context is the way the process of management of safety risk handles changes to the existing infrastructure, processes, technology or other elements and how communications regarding potential accident scenarios are handled and are seen in an integrated way. These changes might have unseen or adverse safety critical impacts. There are several concepts available to guide understanding in the area of safety. System safety is one of the concepts available. The other prominent method is the concept of Inherent safety. Espousing Change management can be seen as another concept in this direction.

Safety Culture, Climate, and Attitude

Safety Culture

Safety culture can be defined as the product of individual and group attitudes, perceptions, and values about workplace behaviors and processes that collectively result safety work units and reliable organizational products (Cox & Flin, 1998; Flin et al., 2000; Hale, 2000; Williamson, Feyer, Cairns, & Biancotti, 1997; Zohar, 1980, 2003). In essence, safety culture describes the organizational attributes that reflect safe work environments (Guldenmund, 2000). This concept is deeply rooted in social systems where comprehensive analysis of errors exposed organizational (Reason, 1998), system (Perrow, 1984), process (Rasmussen, 1999) and human failures (Cook, Render, & Woods, 2000) responsible for most preventable adverse outcomes (Reason, 1990).

Safety Climate

Safety climate.

Safety Attitude

Other Resources

Significant Scholars

Citations and References

Citations

  1. Charles W. L. Hill, and Gareth R. Jones, (2001) Strategic Management. Houghton Mifflin.
  2. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, The Change Masters,(1984)Unwin Paperbacks.
  3. Russel L.Ackoff, Towards System of System Approach,(1971) Management Science.
  4. John D. Sterman, Rebecca Henderson, Eric D. Beinhocker, and Lee I. Newma, Getting Big Too Fast: Strategic Dynamics with Increasing Returns and Bounded Rationality, (2007). Management Science.
  5. " The Wall Street Journal on Management",(1984),Mentor Book
  6. The UK HSE Research Report 367,(2007)Her Majesty's Stationery Office, Norwhich

Related Research Articles

Organizational culture refers to culture related to organizations including schools, universities, not-for-profit groups, government agencies, and business entities. Alternative terms include corporate culture and company culture. The term corporate culture emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was used by managers, sociologists, and organizational theorists in the 1980s.

Edgar Henry Schein was a Swiss-born American business theorist and psychologist who was professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He was a foundational researcher in the discipline of organizational behavior, and made notable contributions in the field of organizational development in many areas, including career development, group process consultation, and organizational culture. He was the son of former University of Chicago professor Marcel Schein.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Business performance management</span> Processes to bring output into alignment with goals

Business performance management (BPM) is a management approach which encompasses a set of processes and analytical tools to ensure that an organization's activities and output are aligned with its goals. BMP is associated with business process management, a larger framework managing organizational processes.

Broadly speaking, modularity is the degree to which a system's components may be separated and recombined, often with the benefit of flexibility and variety in use. The concept of modularity is used primarily to reduce complexity by breaking a system into varying degrees of interdependence and independence across and "hide the complexity of each part behind an abstraction and interface". However, the concept of modularity can be extended to multiple disciplines, each with their own nuances. Despite these nuances, consistent themes concerning modular systems can be identified.

Organizational behavior or organisational behaviour is the: "study of human behavior in organizational settings, the interface between human behavior and the organization, and the organization itself". Organizational behavioral research can be categorized in at least three ways:

Clinical governance is a systematic approach to maintaining and improving the quality of patient care within the National Health Service (NHS) and private sector health care. Clinical governance became important in health care after the Bristol heart scandal in 1995, during which an anaesthetist, Dr Stephen Bolsin, exposed the high mortality rate for paediatric cardiac surgery at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. It was originally elaborated within the United Kingdom National Health Service (NHS), and its most widely cited formal definition describes it as:

A framework through which NHS organisations are accountable for continually improving the quality of their services and safeguarding high standards of care by creating an environment in which excellence in clinical care will flourish.

Quality management ensures that an organization, product or service consistently functions well. It has four main components: quality planning, quality assurance, quality control and quality improvement. Quality management is focused not only on product and service quality, but also on the means to achieve it. Quality management, therefore, uses quality assurance and control of processes as well as products to achieve more consistent quality. Quality control is also part of quality management. What a customer wants and is willing to pay for it, determines quality. It is a written or unwritten commitment to a known or unknown consumer in the market. Quality can be defined as how well the product performs its intended function.

A value network is a graphical illustration of social and technical resources within/between organizations and how they are utilized. The nodes in a value network represent people or, more abstractly, roles. The nodes are connected by interactions that represent deliverables. These deliverables can be objects, knowledge or money. Value networks record interdependence. They account for the worth of products and services. Companies have both internal and external value networks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rosabeth Moss Kanter</span> American economist

Rosabeth Moss Kanter holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle professor of business at Harvard Business School. She co-founded the Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative and served as Director and Founding Chair from 2008-2018. She was the top-ranking woman—No. 11 overall—in a 2002 study of Top Business Intellectuals by citation in several sources. She was named one of the "50 most powerful women in Boston" by Boston Magazine and one of the "125 women who changed our world" over the past 125 years by Good Housekeeping magazine in May 2010.

In functional safety, safety integrity level (SIL) is defined as the relative level of risk-reduction provided by a safety instrumented function (SIF), i.e. the measurement of the performance required of the SIF.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Safety culture</span> Attitude, beliefs, perceptions and values that employees share in relation to risks in the workplace

Safety culture is the collection of the beliefs, perceptions and values that employees share in relation to risks within an organization, such as a workplace or community. Safety culture is a part of organizational culture, and has been described in a variety of ways, notably the National Academies of Science and the Association of Land Grant and Public Universities have published summaries on this topic in 2014 and 2016.

Environment, health and safety (EHS) is the set that studies and implements the practical aspects of protecting the environment and maintaining health and safety at occupation. In simple terms it is what organizations must do to make sure that their activities do not cause harm to anyone. Commonly, quality - quality assurance and quality control - is adjoined to form the company division known as HSQE.

A system accident is an "unanticipated interaction of multiple failures" in a complex system. This complexity can either be of technology or of human organizations and is frequently both. A system accident can be easy to see in hindsight, but extremely difficult in foresight because there are simply too many action pathways to seriously consider all of them. Charles Perrow first developed these ideas in the mid-1980s. Safety systems themselves are sometimes the added complexity which leads to this type of accident.

An occupational exposure limit is an upper limit on the acceptable concentration of a hazardous substance in workplace air for a particular material or class of materials. It is typically set by competent national authorities and enforced by legislation to protect occupational safety and health. It is an important tool in risk assessment and in the management of activities involving handling of dangerous substances. There are many dangerous substances for which there are no formal occupational exposure limits. In these cases, hazard banding or control banding strategies can be used to ensure safe handling.

Prevention through design (PtD), also called safety by design usually in Europe, is the concept of applying methods to minimize occupational hazards early in the design process, with an emphasis on optimizing employee health and safety throughout the life cycle of materials and processes. It is a concept and movement that encourages construction or product designers to "design out" health and safety risks during design development. The process also encourages the various stakeholders within a construction project to be collaborative and share the responsibilities of workers' safety evenly. The concept supports the view that along with quality, programme and cost; safety is determined during the design stage. It increases the cost-effectiveness of enhancements to occupational safety and health.

Collaborative leadership is a management practice which is focused on leadership skills across functional and organizational boundaries.

A concept-driven strategy is a process for formulating strategy that draws on the explanation of how humans inquire provided by linguistic pragmatic philosophy. This argues that thinking starts by selecting a set of concepts gained from our past experiences. These are used to reflect on whatever happens, or is done, in the future.

Psychological safety is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. In teams, it refers to team members believing that they can take risks without being shamed by other team members. In psychologically safe teams, team members feel accepted and respected contributing to a better "experience in the workplace". It is also the most studied enabling condition in group dynamics and team learning research.

Team Based Learning Organisation (TBLO)

References

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