You don’t need to buy into the adaptive views (S-II, resilience engineering etc.) to be more critical about how easily the term “human error” can be corrupted to a simplistic focus on people, at the expense of effective higher-order organisational design and improvements. The below are generalities and not universal truths, of course. But, I… Continue reading Mini-post: Changing the human condition vs the conditions that people work under

This brief conference paper explored psychosocial hazards and risks in the New South Wales construction industry. Survey responses were obtained from around 100 people (workers, contractor managers, experts/consultants, project managers) in two private construction companies and one government department having construction project management experience. Results: Key findings from the data indicated that: Although these findings… Continue reading Psychological hazards and risks in the construction industry in New South Wales

Safety management in construction is an integral effort and its success requires inputs from all stakeholders across design and construction phases. Effective risk mitigation relies on the concordance of all stakeholders’ risk perceptions. Many researchers have noticed the discordance of risk perceptions among critical stakeholders in safe construction work, however few have provided quantifiable evidence… Continue reading Stakeholder perceptions of risk in construction

Do you use STAR cards, Take 5’s etc.? Would you know if the data was made up? I found the interesting example below from a legal deposition of a worker on Deepwater Horizon. It’s from an audit commenting on pre-start risk assessments on the rig. This isn’t a study, but I thought it was interesting enough… Continue reading Mini-post: Made up safety data and managing the targets

This explored the sociotechnical aspects of risk management in construction – both by: 1) drawing on interviews with 32 construction managers, consultants and experts who provided their thoughts on hazards in construction and how to manage them & 2) applying a sociotechnical lens to discuss the factors (largely drawing on and refining the Construction Accident… Continue reading Beyond ConCA: Rethinking Causality and Construction Accidents

This was a brief conference paper which focused on the “proposition that offshore workers are not sufficiently focused on issues that have the potential to lead to a major incident” and rather, offshore organisations have placed undue focus on issues relating to personal injuries and lost time incidents. It involved a number of training sessions… Continue reading Is the focus too low on issues that have a potential to lead to a major incident?

Abstract In a study of 357 managers using multiple methods and raters, we investigated how leaders’ affective experience was linked to their transformational leadership. As predicted, we found that leaders who experienced more pleasantness at work were rated by their subordinates as more transformational, and this relationship was partially mediated by leaders’ affective organizational commitment.… Continue reading Do happy leaders lead better? Affective and attitudinal antecedents of transformational leadership

This is an interesting cross-sectional study which looked at the self-reported occurrences of sleep disruption and vehicle accidents or near miss accidents among new parents (abstract below). It found that sleep problems are, as expected, common in new parents and poor quality sleep and impaired daytime function during the postpartum stage are associated with self-reported… Continue reading A Preliminary Study of New Parents, Sleep Disruption, and Driving: A Population at Risk?

P2/2 Yesterday’s post covered a change initiative in an oil & gas company which happened during a company merger. Standardising work processes, practices and cultures were key initiatives. Despite the intended positive benefits of standardising, a number of perceived negative effects were also evident (see post 1). After covering the findings pre- and post-change, the… Continue reading The role of standardization in safety management – A case study of a major oil & gas company (2/2)

P1/2 This explored the strengths and weaknesses of various kinds of safety management standardisation and how it may affect an organisations’ ability to operate safely in normal conditions and to deal with unexpected events. See here for part 2 of this post. Data in the form of observations and interviews with offshore and onshore managers… Continue reading The role of standardization in safety management – A case study of a major oil & gas company (1/2)