1. Introduction to Work and Organizational Psychology Gerhard Ohrband 11 th lecture Safety at work

2. Course structure Part I Introduction 1Managing diversity 2History and context for Work and Organizational Psychology / Roles and methods Part II People at work 3 Job Analysis and Design 4Personal Selection 5 Training

3. Course structure 6Performance Appraisal: Assessing and Developing Performance and Potential 7 Job Stress and Health Part III Human Factors at Work 8Workload and Task Allocation 9Work Environments and Performance 10The Design and Use of Work Technology 11 Safety at Work

4. Course structure Part IV Organizations at Work 12Leadership and management 13Work motivation 14Teams: the challenges of cooperative work 15Organizational development (OD)

5. Part III – Human Factors at work 11Safety at work Outline: 1. Introduction 2. Individuals and safety behaviour 3. Human error 4. Accidents, error and stress 5. Violations of safety procedures 6. Personality 7. Technological systems, organizations and safety: disasters 8. Organizational safety practices 9. Error management in technological systems

6. 1. Introduction Example: control rooms in nuclear power stations and chemical processing plants  Based on computer control and display of the plant’s processes  Rather mental than physical demands placed on the human operator

7. Evaluation of Safety Systems Questions: What do operators understand of the system and technology they control? How does automation affect this understanding, and the cognitive nature of the control task? How much capacity do operators have in dealing with mental workload? What happens when fatigue sets in? Is understanding of routine operations sufficient in an emergency situation? How does stress affect cognitive processing?

8. 2. Individuals and safety behaviour Social psychology and cognitive psychology  Cognitive psychology tradition: human error performance as a function of mental processing operations  Social psychology tradition: personality, attitudes and perception

9. 3. Human error  Why make people mistakes or forget to do critical parts of their job?  People as processors of information  Studies in nuclear, chemical and aviation industries  What are errors?

10. Reason’s taxonomy of unsafe acts (1990) Unsafe acts unintentional slipslapses intended mistakesviolations

11. 4. Accidents, error and stress  Does workplace stress have an impact on accidents and error?  Difficult to test because (a) factors like fatigue are difficult to manipulate; (b) because the question demands studying moment-by-moment fluctuations in, say, time pressure, and its effects on error, and this is very hard to do in the workplace.

12. 5. Violations of safety procedures  Where workers intentionally break safety procedures and rules. Sabotage as the most extreme reason, most often ignoring of procedures. Why?  Risk perception  Attitude to safety

13. Precaution adoption model (Weinstein, 1988) 1.Aware of the existence of the hazard 2.Aware of the susceptibility of others to the effects of the hazard 3.Aware of own susceptibility to the hazard 4.Deciding to act to prevent the hazard causing harm 5.Acting to prevent the hazard causing harm

14. 6. Personality  Personality: relatively enduring, stable, disposition  Study of accidents in munitions factories in England during the First World War: majority of accidents involved relatively few people (‘accident proneness’, Farmer and Chambers, 1926)  No support that there is a stable personality trait of being accident prone  Instead: different people go through periods of being more prone (Reason, 1974)

15. 7. Technological systems, organizations and safety: disasters  Reason (1990) divides the contributions people make to system accidents into two broad categories: latent and active errors  Latent errors: present in a system owing to decisions taken by management and regulatory bodies  Active errors: unsafe acts taken for a variety of psychological reasons.  Balancing of production goals and safety goals  Production goals are easily measured and very visible, and when met rewarded positively

16. 8. Organizational safety practices  Accident reporting  Safety programmes  Safety climate Zohar (1980) found several organizational characteristics that distinguished production companies with high and low accident rates. Low accident companies:  Management commitment to safety, manifested, for example, by the personal involvement of top management in routine safety activities, and by safety being given a high priority in company meetings and production scheduling.  Importance given to safety training  Existence of open communication and frequent contact between workers and management  “good house keeping: orderly plant operations and high usage of safety devices

17. 9. Error management in technological systems  Human reliability studies  Error tolerant systems  Error reduction

18. Discussion Points 1.In what ways do individual and organizational factors interact to produce unsafe working conditions? 2.How is risk related to safety at work? 3.What are the benefits of viewing human error as a consequence of normal cognitive functioning? 4.Can technological systems be made safer through organizational interventions?

19. Literature  Pidgeon, N., Hood, C., Jones, D., Turner, B. and Gibson, R. (1992). Risk: Analysis, Perception and Management. London: The Royal Society.  Reason, J.T. (1990). Human Error. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.