The effects of organizational management and human factors on accidents in steel plants

Ziel

To investigate the psychological, social and organizational contributions to risk and accidents in the steel industry, and to develop a multifaceted framework for quantitatively and qualitatively assessing these influences in relation to accidents and the overall risk assessment of plants, and monitoring the effectiveness of procedures for reducing accident levels.
Prior to the research it had been a growing belief in the safety field that attitudes were an important factor in accidents. This had been demonstrated by early work at Surrey. The results of the present research confirmed that early finding, and refined the instruments for measuring attitudes. Further, it demonstrated the validity of the approach on a cross-national European basis. This represented the first time that this had been done. The results represent a major advance in understanding the psychological and management factors in safety at national and European levels.

The research established an empirical basis for the structure of safety attitudes: critical roles of members of the organization were identified, and safety attitude was shown to share the tripartite structure of attitudes in general as hypothesised in the literature. In addition, two distinct domains of safety attitude were found to exist: attitudes to safe working behaviour were shown to have a separate psychological structure from attitudes to working unsafely. Problems associated with the reporting and recording of accident incidence were explored, and the measure of accident rate adopted by the SRU was found to be effective in demonstrating that a relationship exists between attitude measures and accident rates. It was found that scales relating to the salient components of safety climate also had a direct relationship to accident rate, and that these could be combined to provide profiles of safety climate, which revealed the performance of individual study groups against a normative data base. The scale profiles were used to distinguish safety attitude climate both between and within study sites, and were found to have a practical utility as tools for planning and policy recommendations, in conjunction with background data elicited from the management checklist.

Towards the conclusion of the present project, development had begun on a prototype version of a software program which allows interactive production of safety diagnostic scale profiles.
This will involve the analysis of the following factors in selected sites in the steel industry.

i) The motivations, attitudes, knowledge, and abilities and risk-taking behaviour of individuals and work-groups;

ii) The organizational and national contexts in which the individuals and groups operate. This includes both the organization as a whole, and, where relevant, the context of particular plants. The context is taken to include such factors as organizational climate and culture, attitude toward safety, expertise within the organization, and the activities of the organization such as implementation of safety procedures and practices.

It will include objective indices of the state of the organization, such as turnover rates and age distribution of the workforce as well as more 'psychological' factors.

iii) The production processes and engineering environment of each site both in their own right, and in interaction with factors i & ii above.

iv) The examination of specific dangerous occurrences and accidents occurring during the period of study. The rarity of major incidents does mean that other accidents, especially lost time accidents , will be used as estimates of the risk related performance of the plant.

Programm/Programme

ECSC-WORKSAFE C - First joint research programme (ECSC) "Safety in the European Coal and Steel Community industries", 1989-1993

Thema/Themen

Aufforderung zur Vorschlagseinreichung

Data not available

Finanzierungsplan

Data not available

Koordinator

University of Surrey

EU-Beitrag

Keine Daten

Adresse

GU2 5XH Guildford
Vereinigtes Königreich

Gesamtkosten