The Role of Distrust in Offshore Safety Performance

How does distrust influence facets of safety in offshore?

This surveyed 203 UK offshore gas workers on attitudes of trust and distrust towards workmates, supervisors, offshore managers, and contractors.

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Background:
·        “Trust has been described as a lubricant for open and frequent safety communication”

·        “individuals feel safer and more positive about a leader who they perceive as trustworthy. However, those with low levels of trust in a leader are likely to report negative attitudes and find states of dependency psychologically distressing”

·        “Distrust has been shown to result in competitiveness, poor interpersonal behavior, poor work performance, and poor psychological health”

Findings:
·        “Logistic regression analysis identified attitudes toward offshore management as the strongest predictor of safety performance at an industry level”

·        “At an installation level, safety performance was best predicted by attitudes toward contractors and workmates”

·        “analysis revealed attitudes of distrust as better predictors of safety performance compared to attitudes of trust”

·        Of predictor variables distrust of managers & contractor staff, and trust in workmates & org trust, only distrust of offshore managers was a statistically significant predictor (though its overall contribution to predicting incidents was small, with an odds ratio of .93)

·        In their words, which I think is pretty deterministic & optimistic, but based on their model “it would be predicted that a one-unit increase of distrust (which corresponds to a reduction of distrust in offshore managers) would be associated with a 7% reduction in accidents and incidents off-shore”

·        “results are consistent with Mearns et al.’s (1997) findings that management play a strong role in shaping offshore safety attitudes for the industry, but supervisors and workmates influence safety attitude formation on specific installations”

·        “results indicate that a reduction in accidents and incidents offshore could be achieved following a reduction of distrust in offshore managers, contractor staff, and workmates”

And I suspect some won’t agree, they say:

“it appears that the theoretical emphasis that safety professionals place on the importance of trust might outweigh its significance at an empirical level”

Study link: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6924.2006.00822.x