This study explored human performance in the context of scheduled outage work in nuclear power plants using a situation awareness (SA) taxonomy. Most SA research has focused on individual information processing, knowledge states, decision making and resulting outcomes. However, there are also frameworks that focus on “team situation awareness”, “shared situation awareness” or “distributed situation… Continue reading Situation awareness in outage work – A study of events occurring in U.S. nuclear power plants between 2016 and 2020

An ethnographic study at two large construction sites, which empirically observed the differences between cooperation and discipline. They drew on themes of safety as enforcement and engagement from prior work (e.g. Sherratt et al.) and also power embedded within safety (e.g. Antonsen). That is, how “inconsistent efforts of management to facilitate independence and involvement of… Continue reading Developing safety cooperation in construction: between facilitating independence and tightening the grip

In the world of decision making, thinking, intuition and risk, it’s safe to say that the somewhat negative view of bias and heuristics has become the modus operandi (e.g. the body of work by or inspired by Kahneman and Tversky…but important in its own right) compared to alternative & complementary perspectives. Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM)… Continue reading Fast & Frugal Heuristics

This paper ran three studies to measure the motives behind safety silence and then developed and tested a survey tool to assess these motives in the workplace. Employee silence is described as “a lack of upward communication regarding concerns, ideas, or opinions relating to the improvement of organizational functioning” (p144), or essentially the reluctance of… Continue reading Staying silent about safety issues: Conceptualizing and measuring safety silence motives

This paper from Anita Tucker & Amy Edmondson explored how problem-solving behaviours may focus too much on overcoming immediate obstacles that they inhibit broader organisational learning. That is, people are too good at adapting and workarounds to make broken or inefficient systems work, and by doing so, obscure system improvement. Providing context, they argue that:… Continue reading When problem solving prevents organizational learning

This tested decision making (DM) performance by teaching junior officers in a fast & frugal heuristic. A heuristic is “a strategy that arrives at a satisfactory solution with a modest amount of computation” (p3). Heuristics allow adequate strategies to be found particularly when time is limited. Providing background, they note: ·        While heuristics simplify and… Continue reading Training Fast and Frugal Heuristics in Military Decision Making

This open access article may interest my sleep & fatigue colleagues. They looked at how post-sleep experiences influence a person’s subjective evaluation of their sleep evaluation from the previous night. ABSTRACT How we form judgements of sleep quality is poorly understood. Emerging literature suggests that people infer their sleep quality based on multiple sources of… Continue reading Judgement of sleep quality of the previous night changes as the day unfolds: A prospective experience sampling study

This study explored the links of fatigue on hazard recognition skills in construction. 155 electrical power transmission and distribution line workers in the US were included in the sample. Psychomotor vigilance testing was utilised to represent fatigue impairment whereas construction scenarios were used for hazard identification. Providing background, it’s noted that: Results A moderate negative… Continue reading Impact of Worker Fatigue on Hazard Recognition Skills

I found this an interesting little study. They studied how people employ resilient behaviours to varying degrees of variability. Via use of a fire fighting simulator, 21 uni students [** note the limitation of the sample] responded to a range of building fire extinguishing scenarios that introduced degrees of variability (e.g. removing fire trucks from… Continue reading In What Conditions Do People Adopt “Resilient” Behavior for Safety?

Using three studies, this paper developed a measure of Pro-social rule breaking (PSRB) and explored its influence on workplace perceptions, counterproductive behaviours, and task and contextual performance ratings made by supervisors via survey. PSRB is when employees volitionally choose to depart from top-down rules in order to benefit others, e.g. the organisation or stakeholders; like… Continue reading Breaking rules for the right reasons? An investigation of pro-social rule breaking