Dynamic safety capability and management systems: An assessment tool to evaluate the “fitness-to-operate” in high-risk industrial environments

Aim: The paper outlines a systemic approach to understanding and assessing safety capability in high-risk industries, like off-shore oil, gas industry, chemical operators. The "Fitness to Operate" framework (acronym: FTO) (Griffin et al., 2014) has been recently defined by three enabling capitals that create safety capability: organizational capital, social capital, and human capital. Furthermore, each type of capital is identified by more specific dimensions based on current theories of safety, management, and organizational processes. In this paper, we will present a multidimensional assessment tool that offers a comprehensive picture of safety capability by real industrial operators in order to understand and evaluate their "fitness-to-operate" (FTO). Method: This current paper aims to describe the multi-phase development process of a FTO assessment tool in the format of a multidimensional survey questionnaire. A) The first research phase consists of the item generation of a large prototype pool with about 200 contents-items covering the 27 dimensions of the conceptual representation of the FTO framework. This initial pool was developed by a team of academic researchers, through a deductive process, and in the light of the original FTO conceptualization, as defined by Griffin and colleagues (2014) B) In a second research phase, the initial pools of items were re-examined by a new pool of academic researchers, assessing the quality of the contents, and in order to refine the extensive version of the prototype, eliminating potential redundancies and inadequate items. C) In a third phase with structured interviews to a pool of industrial experts (senior safety managers; senior executives), the authors assessed the quality of the prototype tool developed by the academic researchers, in order to evaluate and ranks the items of the prototype in term of quality, in order to define and identify a shorter version of the prototype. All the items were assessed by the experts considering criteria such as: i) relevance ii) clearness iii) verifiability iv) specificity v) ease of answer. Implications: Overall, the FTO assessment tool enables a comprehensive coverage of factors that influence short-term and long-term safety outcomes. The tool may serve to help safety regulators and industrial operators to understand, assess, and eventually implement and improve the safety capability and fitness-to-operate in complex industrial and organizational context

Online recruitment: The role of trust in technology

In recent years, online recruitment has become a prevalent human resource management practice worldwide. Although studies emphasized the importance of candidates' perceptions related to the recruiting web site attributes, there is no research focused on the effects of trust toward the IT technology during the online application process. Given the importance of trust dynamics in personnel recruitment, the aim of this study is to investigate the role of trust towards the web platforms supporting online recruitment. Results, from a sample of university students including 330 participants, showed that trust toward the web site affects both directly and indirectly - via company attractiveness - the intention to apply for a job

Upward Safety Communication In The Workplace: How Team Leaders Stimulate Employees’ Voice Through Empowering and Monitoring Supervision

The importance of employees’ voice for workplace safety management is receiving growing attention. The present contribution focuses on three different categories of safety-specific voice behaviours and their links with complementary safety supervision styles: promotive voice (i.e. offering original suggestions to improve safety in work practices), preventive voice (i.e. raising personal concerns for potential risks), and proscriptive voice (i.e. speaking up against violations of safety standards). The first aim of the study is to provide evidence of the differential validity of the three categories of safety voice. Second, it intends to investigate how team leaders can stimulate these different kinds of employees’ voice. A survey investigation was conducted in a multinational chemical industry (N = 192). The statistical results of the study unveil that only empowering supervision affected promotive and preventive voices, whereas proscriptive voice was found to be affected by both empowering and monitoring supervision. Overall, the findings seem to indicate a substantial conceptual independence between the three categories of safety voice. At the same time, the study suggests that distinct supervision actions may affect these different expressions of employees’ safety voice in different ways, underlining the importance of a differential approach to these constructs, not only for research advancement, but also for the design of appropriate organisational programs aimed at stimulating open safety communication in the workplace, and to develop a more articulated approach to safety supervision, in order to support employees’ propensity to engage in appropriate safety voice actions, in accordance with their working situations

Speaking up about workplace safety: An experimental study on safety leadership

In this study, we test whether dierent types of safety leadership styles predict dierent employees\u2019 change-oriented discretionary communications about safety (i.e., safety voice) after controlling for proactive personality disposition to improve organizational sustainability. Building upon a multidimensional model of safety voice, which attempts to conceptualize dierent ways in which employees make suggestions about safety procedures, we developed four realistic scenarios in which we manipulated the supervisor\u2019s safety leadership style, including: (1) transformational safety leadership, (2) transactional safety leadership, (3) passive safety leadership, and (4) control group (i.e., no leadership at all). We randomly assigned 103 participants to two of four scenarios and measured four facets of safety voice and proactive personality dispositions. The findings showed that after controlling for the respondents\u2019 proactive personality, transformative safety leadership predicted promotive safety voice, transactional safety leadership predicted preventive safety voice, and passive safety leadership predicted hostile safety voice. These findings have a number of implications for our understanding of safety leadership and employees\u2019 safety communications

Safety citizenship behavior (SCB) in the workplace: A stable construct? Analysis of psychometric invariance across four European countries

Safety citizenship behaviors (SCBs) are important participative organizational behaviors that emerge in work-groups. SCBs create a work environment that supports individual and team safety, encourages a proactive management of workplace safety, and ultimately, prevents accidents. In spite of the importance of SCBs, little consensus exists on research issues like the dimensionality of safety citizenship, and if any superordinate factor level of safety citizenship should be conceptualized, and thus measured. The present study addressed this issue by examining the dimensionality of SCBs, as they relate to behaviors of helping, stewardship, civic virtue, whistleblowing, voice, and initiating change in current practices. Data on SCBs were collected from four industrial plants (N = 1065) in four European countries (Italy, Russia, Switzerland, United Kingdom). The results show that SCBs structure around two superordinate second-order factors that reflect affiliation and challenge. Multi-group analyses supported the structure and metric invariance of the two-factor model across the four national subsamples

Identifying system adaptations to overcome technology-based workflow challenges in a telephone triage organization

Call-center-based telephone triage is an example of a complex sociotechnical system relying on successful interactions between patients, callers, and the integration of many digital technologies. Digital technologies such as computer decision support systems are used to standardize triage outcomes with little consideration of how these unique healthcare systems adapt to maintain functionality in response to real-world operating challenges. Using structured observations of call handlers in two call centers and guided by usability heuristics and the concept of ‘workarounds’, this paper aims to investigate the effects of technology design on workflow and system adaptations. Opportunities for improvement are highlighted, particularly, assessment prompts, and updating software to reflect dynamic real-world situations. Interactions between system components, especially technological and organizational processes affected workflow, making adaptations at the individual and organizational levels necessary to ensure callers could be triaged safely. System designers could consider these findings to improve systems and procedures during challenging periods

Multilevel Safety Climate in The UK Rail Industry: A Cross Validation of the Zohar and Luria MSC Scale

Despite a downward trend in injury rates in UK workplaces, accident occurrence remains an on-going issue for the rail workforce. Results from the RSSB annual survey reveal that there were 164 major injuries in 2016/17. Safety climate is defined as “shared perceptions with regard to safety policies, procedures and practices.” Many studies have examined the positive effects of safety climate on safety performances by individuals, teams, organizations. Despite widespread attempts to measure safety climate, the validity of measurement tools has not been systematically tested in the rail industry. The primary goal of our research was to validate Zohar and Luria’s (2005) Multilevel Safety Climate Scale in a sample of rail infrastructure workers (N = 528). A cross-validation strategy was adopted. Half of the data were used to conduct exploratory factor analysis (EFA), with the remaining data submitted to confirmative factor analysis (CFA). The statistical results reveal a three-factor structure with organizational safety climate (OSC), supervisor safety communication (SSC), supervisor safety monitoring (SSM). A nomological analysis showed that SSC and SSM presented distinct correlation patterns with other measures of relevance for safety, risk and health management. SSM was found more strongly related with variables such as: safety priorities; safety systems; reporting attitudes; safety compliance. On the other hand, SSC was mainly related with measures refereed to distinct forms of organizational support: supervisor support; peer support; support to change. Overall, our findings showed the validity of a multidimensional approach on the study of safety climate and safety supervision in the rail industry

Energy and environmental aspects of mobile communication systems

The reduction of the energy consumptions of a Telecommunication Power System represents one of the critical factors of the telecommunication technologies, both to allow a sizeable saving of economic resources and to realize "sustainable" development actions. The consumption of about one hundred base stations for mobile phones were monitored for a total of over one thousand days, in order to study the energy consumption in relation to the environmental, electric and logistics parameters of the stations themselves. It was possible to survey, then, the role of the mobile communication systems in the general national energy framework and to plot the best areas of intervention for saving energy and improving the environmental impact, showing the role played by air conditioning and transmission equipments. Finally, new transmission algorithms and the use of renewable energy based techniques have been tested.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figure

Safety Climate in Organizations

Safety climate is a collective construct derived from individuals' shared perceptions of the various ways that safety is valued in the workplace. Research over the past 35 years shows that safety climate is an important predictor of safety behavior and safety outcomes such as accidents and injury. We first review the conceptual foundations of safety climate and explore how the construct can be applied to different levels of analysis. We then review ways that safety climate influences individual processes of sense making, motivation, and work behavior. Next, we explore the impact of safety climate on organization-level outcomes related to both safety and productivity. We conclude with suggestions for future research and practice to support the overall safety of people and organizations