Effects of human and organizational deficiencies on workers’ safety behavior at a mining site in Iran

This study explored the relationship between organisational factors, supervision, preconditions for acts and worker acts via structural equation modelling.

305 Iranian mining accidents were analysed via HFACS.

If you look past the rather normative frame of trying to categorise things via loose concepts like unsafe acts/preconditions etc., you’ll find a pretty progressive and sympathetic paper towards human and organisational performance.

Providing context:

·       They note that while some investigations “attrib­uted nearly 85% of mine accidents to human error”, this is problematic since “hu­man behavior in a complex socio-technical system such as the mining industry is affected by various organizational and environ­mental factors”. Hence, “it cannot be correct to consider human error to be the main cause of accidents”

·       Other mining research has found “identified inadequacies in management measures” to be leading contributors to workplace incidents

The categories they used to code accidents are below, as are found within HFACS.

Note: Don’t over-analyse the specific percentages, nor the subjective language or breakdowns in unsafe acts/preconditions etc. The overarching findings are somewhat interesting, though, I think.

Results

Overall they found that:

·       Organisational deficiencies had a direct positive effect on worker rule or practice departures and performance variability [** i.e. violations and errors according to the tools]

·       Supervision was significantly related to the same performance facets as above

·       Preconditions for behaviour also had a significant effect on performance

·       “organizational deficiencies had an indirect positive effect on workers’ unsafe acts, mediated by unsafe supervision and preconditions for unsafe acts”

·       “Among the variables examined in the current study, organizational influences had the strongest impact on worker actions”

They state that organisational factors were found to have the strongest statistical effects on subsequent worker action, and hence, the strongest connections to accident precursors.

Specifically, organisational climate had the strongest effect for the worker effects, whereas organisational process had the least effect.

Inadequate supervision and supervisory ‘violations’ were nearly equal in influencing ‘unsafe supervision’.

Based on the workers’ errors model, resource management had the most influence on the organisational influences. Planned inappropriate operation and inadequate supervision had a large effect on inadequate supervision, whereas ‘supervisory violations’ had a small effect.

Discussing the findings, they state that while “Workers’ unsafe acts are usually considered to be the main cause of industrial accidents” in complex systems, humans are “only one of multiple mutually-interacting” facets of systems.

Prior research has identified the direct effects of organisational factors on worker action, like safety culture/climate factors, work and time pressure and more.

Other factors include social reasons, like being teased for rule following, a sign of weakness, or inconsistency with social norms.

Lack of attention from management towards solving environmental and technological problems, like inadequate funding, also influences worker action. Under such constraints, people find efficiencies in their work, like workarounds.

As expected, several limitations are present, like 1) all data came from one mining site, 2) the data sources (accident reports), 3) and categorisation and coding (what-you-look-for-is-what-you-find and more).

Authors: Aliabadi, M. M., Aghaei, H., Kalatpour, O., Soltanian, A. R., & SeyedTabib, M. (2018). Epidemiology and health, 40.

Study link: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6060340/

LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/effects-human-organizational-deficiencies-workers-site-ben-hutchinson-g99yc