Complacency in Process Safety: A Behavior Analysis Toward Prevention Strategies

ABSTRACT

Complacency inhibits safe behaviors of workers and managers. This is of concern to industries where process safety is needed to reduce the chance of catastrophic events such as fires and explosions. A behavioral definition of complacency is offered as trending behavioral variation that eventually exceeds safety boundaries. Behavioral processes that contribute to these patterns of variability are discussed and analyzed, including habituation, extinction, unprogrammed reinforcement, the avoidance paradox, rule-governed behavior, and competing contingencies of production. Solution strategies are suggested that address this analysis of behavioral variance, including pinpointing behavioral variation related to safety, changing training design, strengthening positive reinforcement for process-related behaviors of workers and management, reducing sources of unprogrammed reinforcement for dangerous variation, strengthening rule-governed behavior, and changing contingencies for managers and executives whose decisions affect behavior and process safety at many levels in the company.     

Behavioral Perspectives on Variability in Human Behavior as Part of Process Safety

ABSTRACT

Process safety involves worker decisions at various points in an extended process, and much remains unknown regarding sources of variability in worker behavior at these decision points. This paper seeks to explain why some workers may be deviating from sanctioned policies and procedures. Risky choice is analyzed through discussion of positive and negative reinforcement, habituation in terms of respondent and operant behavior, risk discounting, and consequence dimensions that include a review of prospect theory, heuristics, and behavioral decision theory. Recommendations are made for improving our understanding of sources of variability in process safety by conducting systematic research on the perspectives reviewed.     

Offsetting or Enhancing Behavior: An Empirical Analysis of Motorcycle Helmet Safety Legislation

This study uses state‐level panel data from a 33‐year period to test the hypotheses of offsetting and enhancing behavior with regards to motorcycle helmet legislation. Results presented in this article find no evidence of offsetting behavior and are consistent with the presence of enhancing behavior. State motorcycle helmet laws are estimated to reduce motorcycle crashes by 18.4% to 31.9%. In the absence of any behavioral adaptations among motorcyclists mandatory helmet laws are not expected to have any significant impact on motorcycle crash rates. The estimated motorcycle crash reductions do not appear to be driven by omitted variable bias or nonclassical measurement error in reported crashes. Overall, the results strongly suggest that mandatory helmet laws yield significant changes in motorcycle mobility in the form of reduced risk taking and/or decreased utilization.     

团队心理安全、组织公民行为和团队创新--一个中介传导模型的实证分析

团队和创新已经成为新经济条件下企业所关心的重要问题,而团队如何创新的问题则更为理论界和实践界所关注.以往的研究认为团队心理安全(Team Psychological Safety)有助于团队创新的实现,而关于团队心理安全通过怎样的具体机制来影响团队创新则一直存在争议.本文认为,组织公民行为(OCB)能够充当这一过程的中介变量.团队心理安全影响团队创新的途径可能是团队心理安全能够导致组织公民行为,而组织公民行为则能够导致团队创新.本文采用实证分析方法,在Baron和Kennv中介变量判断原则的基础上验证了这一假设.文章还对本研究的局限性和进一步研究方向进行了讨论.     

基于层次分析法在价值链分析中的应用研究

竞争者价值链之间的差异是竞争优势的一个关键来源,但是竞争价值链分析大多停留在定性分析阶段,只是提出了分析思路和模式,在定量化分析方面尚未有较为深入的进展。层次分析法是解决这类问题的行之有效的方法,本文尝试将层次分析法引入价值链分析中,通过对不同企业价值链活动的分析,得出竞争优势的优先排序,作为企业并购的决策依据。研究表明,本方法对企业并购的决策分析是比较有意义的。     

Managing Socially-Responsible Buying:: How to Integrate Non-economic Criteria into the Purchasing Process

Companies are increasingly scrutinized by various audiences and are made accountable not only for their internal practices, but also for their suppliers’ behavior. Many purchasing managers and executives are not accustomed to seeing the purchasing function receive so much attention from different parties. As a result, a number of them do not know how to embrace the trend toward socially responsible buying (SRB). The present paper offers a helping hand by (1) shedding some light on the nature of SRB and (2) explaining how companies can incorporate social responsibility criteria into their purchasing decisions.     

Competitive Goals and Plant Investment in Environment and Safety Practices: Moderating Effect of National Culture

Operations managers clearly play a critical role in targeting plant‐level investments toward environment and safety practices. In principle, a “rational” response would be to align this investment with senior management's competitive goals for operational performance. However, operations managers also are influenced by contingent factors, such as their national culture, thus creating potential tension that might bias investment away from a simple rational response. Using data from 1,453 plants in 24 countries, we test the moderating influence of seven of the national cultural characteristics on investment at the plant level in environment and safety practices. Four of the seven national cultural characteristics from GLOBE (i.e., uncertainty avoidance, in‐group collectivism, future orientation and performance orientation) shifted investment away from an expected “rational” response. Positive bias was evident when the national culture favored consistency and formalized procedures and rewarded performance improvement. In contrast, managers exhibited negative bias when familial groups and local coalitions were powerful, or future outcomes—rather than current actions—were more important. Overall, this study highlights the critical importance of moving beyond a naïve expectation that plant‐level investment will naturally align with corporate competitive goals for environment and safety. Instead, the national culture where the plant is located will influence these investments, and must be taken into account by senior management.     

Societal Responses to Familiar Versus Unfamiliar Risk: Comparisons of Influenza and SARS in Korea

This study examines the connections between familiar (influenza) and unfamiliar (SARS) risks among the general public in a SARS affected society. Using a survey of 350 respondents in Chonju, we find that risk perceptions and a belief that influenza vaccination reduces the incidence of SARS explain behavioral intentions for influenza vaccination and purchase responses to a hypothetical SARS vaccine. Those respondents who believe that an influenza vaccination will very likely reduce SARS incidence have a high probability (79%) of intending to vaccinate, but a much lower WTP for a SARS vaccine than those without such a belief. This belief undoubtedly was influenced by a reframing of influenza vaccination as preventing SARS. Such reframing may lead to short-term improvements in vaccination rates to the detriment of long-term SARS vaccination development. When compared with a similar study in Taiwan, societal risk perceptions of SARS and WTP for a vaccine vary greatly according to the extent of a society's experience with SARS.     

Task Analysis for Industrial Work Process from Aspects of Human Reliability and System Safety

In the design, development, and manufacturing stage of industrial products, engineers usually focus on the problems caused by hardware or software, but pay less attention to problems caused by human error, which may significantly affect system reliability and safety. Although operating procedures are strictly followed, human error still may occur occasionally. Among the influencing factors, the inappropriate design of standard operation procedure (SOP) or standard assembly procedure (SAP) is an important and latent reason for unexpected results found during human operation. To reduce the error probability and error effects of these unexpected behaviors in the industrial work process, overall evaluation of SOP or SAP quality has become an essential task. The human error criticality analysis (HECA) method was developed to identify the potentially critical problems caused by human error in the human operation system. This method performs task analysis on the basis of operation procedure. For example, SOP, analyzes the human error probability (HEP) for each human operation step, and assesses its error effects to the whole system. The results of the analysis will show the interrelationship that exists between critical human tasks, critical human error modes, and human reliability information of the human operation system. To identify the robustness of the model, a case study of initiator assembly tasks was conducted. Results show that the HECA method is practicable in evaluating the operation procedure, and the information is valuable in identifying the means to upgrade human reliability and system safety for human tasks.     

Toward Improving Food Safety in the Domestic Environment: A Multi-Item Rasch Scale for the Measurement of the Safety Efficacy of Domestic Food-Handling Practices

To reduce consumer health risks from foodborne diseases that result from improper domestic food handling, consumers need to know how to safely handle food. To realize improvements in public health, it is necessary to develop interventions that match the needs of individual consumers. Successful intervention strategies are therefore contingent on identifying not only the practices that are important for consumer protection, but also barriers that prevent consumers from responding to these interventions. A measure of food safety behavior is needed to assess the effectiveness of different intervention strategies across different groups of consumers. A nationally representative survey was conducted in the Netherlands to determine which practices are likely conducted by which consumers. Participants reported their behaviors with respect to 55 different food-handling practices. The Rasch modeling technique was used to determine a general measure for the likelihood of an average consumer performing each food-handling behavior. Simultaneously, an average performance measure was estimated for each consumer. These two measures can be combined to predict the likelihood that an individual consumer engages in a specific food-handling behavior. A single "food safety" dimension was shown to underlie all items. Some potentially safe practices (e.g., use of meat thermometers) were reported as very difficult, while other safe practices were conducted by respondents more frequently (e.g., washing of fresh fruit and vegetables). A cluster analysis was applied to the resulting data set, and five segments of consumers were identified. Different behaviors may have different effects on microbial growth in food, and thus have different consequences for human health. Once the microbial relevance of the different consumer behaviors has been confirmed by experiments and modeling, the scale developed in the research reported here can be used to develop risk communication targeted to the needs of different consumer groups, as well as to measure the efficacy of different interventions.     

The Promise of Strategic Customer Behavior: On the Value of Click Tracking

Click tracking is gaining in popularity, and the practice of web analytics is growing fast. Whether strategic customers are willing to visit a website when they know their clicks may be tracked is an important yet complex problem, which depends on various factors. Using a newsvendor framework, we examine this problem by focusing on the operational factor: how product availability induces strategic customers to voluntarily provide advance demand information. We find that a strong Nash equilibrium exists where every customer is willing to click, and customer incentives to click are robust to noise. Hence, we demonstrate the promise of strategic customer behavior in the context of click tracking, contrary to the conventional wisdom that it is typically a peril for the firm. Notably, click tracking is typically advantageous to both the firm and its customers, compared with other strategies such as advance selling, quantity commitment, availability guarantees, and quick response. Lastly, we extend to two settings by including marketing decisions, price‐sensitive demand and markdown pricing, and discuss how operations and marketing decisions interact in influencing the value of click tracking.     

家长式领导对员工建言行为的影响:心理安全感的中介机制

经济的周期性跨越发展离不开组织的创新,在组织管理中,包括建言行为在内的员工角色外行为研究因此备受关注。以上下级配对的236组制造性企业员工为样本,研究探讨了体现儒家传统的领导方式-家长式领导对员工建言行为的影响,并探讨了心理安全感的中介机制。结果发现,家长式领导中的德行领导维度对员工建言行为具有正面影响,权威领导则有负面影响,且德行和权威领导对建言行为具有交互影响,而其影响机制部分的是通过心理安全感所发生。文章最后对所得结果做了讨论并对未来研究做了展望。     

Recursive Behavior of Safety Stock Reduction: The Effect of Lead‐Time Uncertainty

Motivated by a recent paper on the effect of lead‐time variability reduction on safety stocks, we provide evidence of the recursive nature of safety stock changes. When lead times follow a gamma distribution we demonstrate that, for cycle service levels between .60 and .70, the reduction of lead‐time variability will first increase safety stock and then either recursively decrease safety stock or make it remain constant. We also numerically show the existence of the recursive effect. A two‐by‐two matrix is introduced to assist managers in making decisions regarding safety stock policy.     

Examining the Firm's Value Creation Process: A Managerial Perspective of the Firm's Value Offering Strategy and Performance

The primary pursuit of any business is to understand what customers value and to create that value for them. While customers are the final arbiter of value, it is the firm's role to explore, interpret and deliver value based on what they believe customers are seeking. Based on this premise we adopt the firm's perspective on value creation to extend both Bowman and Ambrosini's theoretical framework and the work of DeSarbo, Jedidi and Sinha and focus on two issues. The first is the strategic emphasis firms place on the design and delivery of their value offering. The second is the extent the firm's value offering explains performance differentials at the customer‐centric performance level. We present a conceptual model of how firms gain positional advantage via their value offering and the realized outcomes they achieve. We present two approaches to modelling the firm's value offering (type II and type IV models) and articulate the theoretical underpinnings and results for these models. Our results validate the conceptualization of the firm's value offering and suggest that creating superior value offerings enables firms to achieve superiority in customer‐centric performance.     

价值工程在合理质量分析中的应用

阐述了价值工程在合理质量分析中应用的意义,论述了不同质量成本模型对质量价值分析的指导意义和适用性,并运用价值工程方法寻找质量价值最优点,以及对传统质量成本区域划分进行改进,给出了价值分析同效益分析相结合的最佳质量水平区间。