1. Behavioural Dilemma on Workplace Safety
Dr. Adeline N. N. Wong
Dean of Students
Office of Student Affairs
Curtin University Malaysia
28th October 2018

2. Have you ever
been in
dilemma?

3. What is workplace safety?

4. Maturity Model of Safety Culture (adapted from British HSE, 2007)

5. Human Factors: Behavioural safety approaches
KEY FEATURES:
Define ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’ behavior
All involve observation of behavior in the workplace
By managers/or peers
With/without targets
Provide feedback
Reinforce safe behavior
‘re-educate’ unsafe behavior
Feedback ranges from on-the-spot specific feedback and discussion, to impersonalised general data

6. https://safestart.com/news/3-big-causes-slips-trips-and-falls/

7. Human Factors
“Environmental, organizational and job factors, and human and individual characteristics, which influence behavior at work in a way which can affect health and safety”

8. Three interrelated aspects in Human Factors
Job
Organisation
Individual

9. Performance-influencing Factors (PIF’s)
Job factors
Clarity of signs, signals, instructions and other information
System/equipment interface
Difficulty/complexity of task
Routine or unusual
Divided attention
Person factors
Physical capability and condition
Fatigue (acute from temporary situation, or chronic)
Stress/morale
Work overload/underload
Competence to deal with circumstances
Motivation vs. other priorities
Organisation factors
Work pressures (production vs safety)
Level and nature of supervision/leadership
Communication
Manning levels
Peer pressure
Clarity of roles and responsibilities
Consequences of failure to follow rules/procedures

10. Key Principles in integrating Human Factors in Risk Assessment
Through your risk assessment identify those tasks which are safety critical or expose people occupational health hazards
Ensure you have an understanding of how these tasks are carried out and environment in which they are performed
Involve the workforce in carrying out the assessment and the identification of appropriate controls
The people carrying out the assessment should have an understanding of the different types of failure and the factors that make them more or less likely to occur
Identify the human failures that could be made in the task which might lead to an accident of incident and the performance influencing factors that make those failures more or less likely to occur
Identify appropriate control measures which prevent or mitigate the human failures you have identified

13. Understanding risky behaviour: Cognitive, Emotional, and Hormonal factor on decision-making under risk
Cognitive
Decision Context
Decision Content
Decision Experience
Emotion
General risky decision-making
Financial decision-making
Precautionary behaviour
Emotion Regulation (ER) strategy
Hormonal
Cortisol VS Oxytocin
Testosterone

14. Cognitive Factor on Risky Decision-making
Decision Context
Naturalistic Decision Making: seeks to understand human cognitive performance by studying how individuals and teams actually make decisions in real-world settings.

15. Cognitive Factor on Risky Decision-making
2. Decision Content
Utility approach: “utility refers to outcomes that are desirable because they are in the person’s best interest” (Reber, A. S., 1995; Manktelow, K., 1999).
This normative/descriptive approach characterizes optimal decision making by the maximum expected utility in terms of monetary value.
This approach can be helpful in gambling theories, but simultaneously includes several disadvantages.
People do not necessarily focus on the monetary payoff, since they find value in things other than money, such as fun, free time, family, health and others.

16. Cognitive Factor on Risky Decision-making
3. Decision Experience
Experience does not have real consequences and is thought of as a learning process.
The decision maker is free to sample from the gambles, without consequence, as many times as needed. During sampling, outcomes from the gamble have no impact on the final payment. Once the decision maker feels ready, he/she chooses a gamble for a one-shot play for real money.

17. Emotional factors on risky behavior decision-making
Immediate emotion
Anticipated emotion
All affective states that the decision-maker has at the time of the decision
Emotions people expect to feel as a consequence of choosing one decision alternative over another
Numerous studies have explored the effects of these two types of emotions on a large variety of decision tasks and contexts (Eg. Behavioral risk-taking and perception of risk, judgments of happiness and overall satisfaction with life)
However, there were mixed findings on which emotion category has more influence on risky behavior
Literature investigating the effect of positive and negative moods on risk-taking behavior also showed mixed findings

18. Emotional factors on risky behavior decision-making
Appraisal Tendency Hypothesis (Lerner, & Keltner, 2000, 2001)
Each emotion is associated with a specific appraisal dimension, which, in turn, will determine the influence of specific emotions on judgments and decisions.
Appraisal certainty and control moderate/mediate emotional effects on risk-taking
For example, induced fear was associated with pessimistic judgments and a more risk-averse choices whereas induced anger was associated with more optimistic judgments and a more risk-seeking behavioral pattern (Lerner, & Keltner, 2000,2001).

19. Emotional factors on risky behavior decision-making
With regards to precautionary behavior, experimental results have shown that buying insurance is more attractive for items with affective descriptions inducing participants’ fear of losing the items (Petrova et al., 2014)
Emotion Regulation (ER) strategy
 the various ways that we influence which emotions we have, when we have them, and how we experience and express these emotions (Gross, 1998). 
the process model of emotion regulation pioneered by Gross (1998a) details five major points of focus during emotion regulation: situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, cognitive change, & response modification (Figure 1).

20. Hormonal Factors on risky behavior decision-making
Key hormones:
Cortisol (stress hormone)
boost risk-taking behavior in men (Kluena, Agorastosb, Wiedemannb, & Schwabe, 2017)
Acute increase associated with higher motivation and more sensation-seeking (Piazza et al., 1993; Putman et al., 2010)
Chronic increase linked to impaired executive (attention) control (Liston et al., 2009), and causes/exacerbate both anxiety (Korte, 2001) and depression (Sapolsky, 2000)
Oxytocin (love hormone)
Higher levels associated with increased trust (Zak et al., 2004; Kosfeld et al., 2005)
Reduces cortisol levels
Testosterone (male hormone)
Individuals with high level of testosterone tended to take greater risks than those with low testosterone, similar between men and women (Stanton et al., 2011)

21. Managing human Failure
Human failure is normal and predictable. It can be identified and managed
Error reduction should be tackled in a structured and proactive way, with as much rigor as the technical aspects of safety
Poorly designed activity  prone to combination of errors and more than one solution may be necessary
Involve workers in design of tasks and procedures
Risk assessment should identify where human failure can occur in safety critical tasks, the performance influencing factors which make it more likely, and the control measures necessary to prevent it
Incident investigations should seek to identify why individuals have failed rather than stopping at ‘operator error’

22. Common pitfall in managing human Failure
Be careful not to:
Treat operators as if they are superhuman, able to intervene heroically in emergencies
Assume that people will always follow procedures
State that operators are highly motivated and thus not prone to unintentional failures or deliberate violations
Rely on training to effectively tackle slip/lapses
Ignore the human component completely and failing to discuss human performance at all in risk assessments
Assume that an operator will always be present, detect a problem and immediately take appropriate action

23. THANK YOU FOR YOUR KIND ATTENTION
OFFICE OF STUDENT AFFAIRS
THANK YOU FOR YOUR KIND ATTENTION