SafetyInsights.org

A study I just read had some interesting findings regarding the risk of collision following 12-hour shift work. First, nothing new that night work led to significantly higher chance of lane deviations and vehicle collisions compared to day workers. Moreover, night shift workers had significantly greater “braking violence” (i.e. jumping hard on the anchors due… Continue reading Vehicle crashes/collisions and 12 hour shift work

A comprehensive meta-analysis that evaluated 117 studies around antecedents to Psychological Safety (PS), how it influences task performance & citizenship behaviours, & how it’s related to leader relations. It’s a 54-page paper, so I’ll cover only a few points. Results: Individual-level factors – proactive personality, emotional stability & learning orientation were significantly related to PS.… Continue reading Psychological Safety: A Meta‐Analytic Review and Extension

One of my favourite brief papers. This discusses the social aetiology of disasters in healthcare, drawing on Barry Turner’s disaster incubation concept. Although it’s related to healthcare and particularly the Mid Staffordshire failure, it draws on insights from other industries and broader research. I can’t do this paper justice, so it’s worth reading for yourself.… Continue reading Early warnings, weak signals and learning from healthcare disasters

Another from the “Reason files”. I present this more as a historical view (even though this rev of the book is only from 2017), rather than as a perspective I necessarily agree with, or not. Here in the Human Contribution, Jim talks about rule-related behaviour and “violations” (I really dislike that word … but will… Continue reading 12 varieties of rule-following behaviour

This 2016 paper explored research & materials to that point on the following questions: ·        Q1: What does the literature state about relationships between indicators and major accident risk? ·        Q2. What does the literature state about the effect of use of indicators? ·        Q3. What does the literature state about the conditions in the surroundings or the… Continue reading Major Accident Indicators in High Risk Industries – A Literature Review

Just summarised a paper that studied the links between the number of consecutive day or night shifts in a swing in relation to reported incidents and near misses, using a large Fortune 500 work scheduling dataset (Laske et al., 2022). One key finding was that risk of an incident increases fairly linearly to each consecutive… Continue reading Principles of work shift scheduling to minimise fatigue and sleep loss

One of my favourite brief discussion papers is a 2014 paper from Carl Macrae – extract below. He explores the social aetiology of disasters within complex organisations (in this case healthcare, but it applies elsewhere, too). This is merely one interesting titbit among many others. Author: Macrae, C. (2014). Early warnings, weak signals and learning… Continue reading Early warnings, weak signals and the social aetiology of disasters

This reviewed the concept of Servant Leadership (SL) across 285 published articles over a 20-year period. It looked at conceptual clarity of SL and compared to other leadership concepts, and evaluated antecedents, outcomes, moderators and mediators. SL is a leadership approach that engages followers in multiple dimensions (e.g. relational, ethical, emotional, spiritual) to help empower… Continue reading Servant Leadership: A systematic review and call for future research

Here is an extract from James Reason’s “Organizational Accidents Revisited” book (p103). He discusses various “alternative views” around organisational accidents, including Barry Turner’s disaster concept, Chick Perrow and Normal Accident Theory and also the contributions from David Woods et al. around cognitive systems. Here he’s talking about the work from Woods et al. regarding the… Continue reading James Reason and his bitter refusal around “error”

This study explored the human cost of Resilient Performance (RP), in the form of burnout, among healthcare professionals. That is, calls to enhance the potential for resilience (resilient potentials) may have an underappreciated toll on people, as they adapt to system deficiencies which further become masked and normalised. Providing background, it’s noted: This paper draws… Continue reading Burnout and network centrality as proxies for assessing the human cost of resilient performance