Violation with concerns of safety: A study on non-compliant behavior and the antecedent and consequent effects in power grid construction

This study explored the links between non-compliant behaviour (procedural departures but accounting for risk perception), safety climate and safety leadership.

390 workers and their supervisors in a Chinese power grid construction firm were sampled.

Note: While this study talks of compliance (and associating rule following as ‘correct’ or ‘compliant’) and violations (I’ve never liked ‘violation’ because it’s so loaded and judgemental), it’s actually pretty progressive in its application and discussion of the findings.

Out of laziness I’m sticking mostly to their wording, but don’t necessarily agree with it.

Providing background:

·       They note that while research and industry have long focused on rule following and departure (e.g. violations), “the idea that violations are merely bad actions by “bad people” may overlook the possible multi-faceted nature of non-compliant behaviors”

·       Rule departures may “actually be performed out of good desire, leading to good outcomes in safety practice”; citing Reason in saying that some violations may promote safety in some situations when “safety rules fail to fit the practice requirement” [** I’ve covered heaps of studies where workarounds can improve the safety and efficiency of work, see my site]

·       They argue that rule departures may stem from largely good desires rather than “malevolent or reckless motivations”, yet much research has largely neglected the non-malevolent actions

·       Many studies are said to treat “non-compliant behaviors as a monolithic source of unsafety and a negative safety performance indicator”, but this doesn’t adequately separate intention and non-intentional, or reckless/malevolent versus non-reckless departures, nor departures that were not linked to a known and appreciated risk awareness

·       They describe a “risk-adjusted non-compliant behavior”, being “intentional deviance from rules with expectations with limited risk of adverse safety outcomes”. That is, people depart from rules/expectations with generally good intentions but were unaware of the specific risks

·       Human decisions and agency are influenced by various individual, organisational and institutional factors in the workplace and these factors combine to “often challenge compliance with safety rules”

·       Workers may develop a lower sensitivity to operational risks and a “weaker awareness of the need for compliance due to cognitive adaptation to the environment”

·       Further, workers also have to balance safety goals with other goals (e.g. productivity vs efficiency), leading to trade-offs often in favour of efficiency

·       Moreover “safety rules in many industries have become complex and burdensome due to external regulations and legal requirements, making it difficult for workers to comply fully”

·       They argue that seeing safety behaviours as either compliant vs non-compliant in a monolithic way may “overlook the complexity of rule-related safety behaviors”. For one, the dichotomy may not capture safety behaviours that lie in the intermediate zone between compliance and violation

·       Here, safety systems establish safety boundaries and control boundaries to regulate performance. Safety boundaries are the scope of safe operations (where exceeding the invisible boundary may lead to a major failure), and the control boundary is the boundary where performance can be corrected without failure

·       Worker performance may drift over time across the control boundary and towards the safety boundary, creeping overtime as no ill consequences occur

·       Finally they discuss the links with safety climate and safety leadership; I’ve skipped a lot of this as I’ve covered so many similar studies. In short, transformational leaders inspire employees to strive for long-term benefits by idealising influence, inspiring motivation, intellectual stimulation and individual consideration

·       Transactional leaders are more likely to exchange with their team via rewards and punishments; this can further be divided into active and passive styles (which I’ve skipped)

 Results

Overall:

·       These findings “challenges the assumption that people violate safety rules in a uniform way” and that “non-compliant behavior pose a monolithic negative indicator of safety performance”

·       Various factors influence rule departures, including how workers perceive risks and rationalise their decisions, and their adjusted non-compliant behaviour measure differentiated actions from violations

·       Safety climate consistently promoted safety compliance and reduced risk-adjusted non-compliance behaviour and violation

·       The effects of leadership, however, were “complex”. Namely, transformational leadership positively predicted safety compliance and negatively predicted violations, and active transactional leadership positively predicted risk-adjusted non-compliant behaviour

·       Transformational leadership wasn’t significantly linked with risk-adjusted non-compliant behaviour

·       Risk-adjusted non-compliant behaviour positively linked with adverse reported outcomes of safety

More interesting I feel are their other findings in the paper. They argue that while safety rules are established in a top-down manner to standardise and constrain behaviour, “they may not reflect the actual conditions of rule execution”.

Hence, workers can encounter situations where they can’t fully comply with processes (e.g. due to scheduling, workload, conflicting requirements and more), hence the “the safety order the management intends to create may differ from the one employees perceive and follow”.

Workers then form their own rules to cope with trade-offs and local constraints and, importantly, “adjust their risk perception and safety actions accordingly”.

Safety, operations and managers should thus “adopt a more interpretive and dialogical approach to safety management, which involves engaging with organizational members to understand their views, motivations, and challenges and to co-create solutions that balance safety and efficiency rather than relying only on prescribed, top-down formal rules”.

Feedback on the workarounds and difficulty of rules should be heeded rather than disregarded, since  the adaptive non-compliances (adaptive workarounds) may be a better or safer way to do the work, or more hazardous.

Further, the importance of transformational leadership and safety climate are discussed.

Authors: Zhou, F., Lu, H., & Jiang, C. (2024). Safety science, 170, 106353.

Study link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2023.106353

LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/violation-concerns-safety-study-non-compliant-effects-ben-hutchinson-jgdnc