Human behaviour and industrial safety

I, Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the general backgrounds of industrial safety (e,g, models of accident causation and of human behaviour) and with the contributions that near miss reporting could make in understanding and controlling accidents and incidents, Also theoretical criticisms of the near miss reporting efforts are discussed here,... 

Tanja Manser is Associate Professor of Industrial Psychology and Human Factors at the University of Fribourg. Her research is focused on human performance and patient safety. Her work focuses on acute care settings, studying safety relevant behaviour such as teamwork and communication at organisational interfaces, using clinical and simulated environments. 

The HSE s publication Human factors in industrial safety (HS(G)48) defines human factors as a range of issues including the perceptual, physical and mental capabilities of people and the interactions of individuals with their jobs and working environments, the influence of equipment and system design on human performance and, above all, the organisational charcteristics which influence safety-related behaviour at work. ... 

In the past it has been irsual for the safety practitioner to concentrate much effort on the hazard and the methods by which it can be removed or controlled. This approach has been very sirccessfirlfy applied in industry, but the irrjrrry causation model now provides the safety practitioner with another new field of investigation in determining the reasons for human error. The human error is not considered to have arty element of blame. What is important is to determine the cause of the human error and to identify the stimtrlus that produced the behaviour pattern which resulted in the error. 

In any safety>critical industry the investigation of incidents, accidents and near-misses is of paramount importance. The means to perform such investigations have developed over a number of years, and most have their roots in the analysis and investigation of failures of hardware or software systems. More recently, however, the reliability of engineered systems has been seen to improve, whereas the reliability of the other key part of any system - the human - has remained relatively unchanged. The net effect of this trend has been that failures of human performance have been elevated in importance in many industries, which in turn has prompted the development of techniques to improve the level of rigour applied to the investigation of human performance and behaviour. 

Safety remains driven by the simple principle of the complete elimination of technical breakdowns and human error. have moved closer to this ideal in industry, the focus has shifted to group behaviour (organisational culture). Safety culture is usually defined as a set of safety-related attitudes, values, or assumptions shared between the members of an organisation. It requires commitment and cooperation from all levels. This implies a unity and integration within an organisation that must be led from the highest levels, and when this does not exist, the consequences can be catastrophic. 

Software safety analysis is another area where further study is required. In recent years, advances in computer technology have been increasingly used to fulfil control tasks to reduce human error and to provide operators with a better working environment in ships. This has resulted in the development of more and more software intensive systems. However, the utilisation of software in control system has introduced new failure modes and created problems in the development of safety-critical systems. The DCR-1996 has dealt with this issue in the UK offshore industry. In formal ship safety assessment, every safety-eritical system also needs to be investigated to make sure that it is impossible or extremely unlikely that its behaviour will lead to a catastrophic failure of the system and also to provide evidence for both the developers and the assessment authorities that the risk associated with the software is acceptable within the overall system risks (Wang (1997)). 

Transaction specific investments are required for the company to be involved in the vegetable industry. Both physical and human investments are required. Case interview showed that guanxi network can influence companies behaviours in terms of transaction specific investments. Most of the companies agreed that they got requests form their buyers regarding investment to improve food quality and safety. The decision will be made depend on the expectation of the future business chance with this buyer. 

This theory has primarily been developed to explain traffic-safety data. In the traffic arena, risk-taking is to a large extent voluntary. In industry, on the other hand, behaviour including risk-taking is subject to management supervision and control. We must, however, expect that the same processes are present in industry but to a lower degree, since they represent basic human traits. 

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