Organizational Factors and Their Influence on Behaviours at Workplace - Coursework Example

Organizational Factors and their Influence on Behaviours at Workplace Name: Lecturer: Course: Date: Table of Contents Table of Contents 2 Background 3 Introduction 4 Organisational Factors 5 Organizational Leadership 6 Organizational Communication 7 Ineffective supervision 8 Clarity of roles and responsibilities 9 Ineffective auditing 11 Individual differences 13 Failure of behavioural-based safety systems to reduce human errors completely 16 Conclusion and Recommendations 17 References 17 Background The concept of human factors in organisational behaviour can be traced back to Frederic Winslow Taylor‘s (1856-1915) scientific management concept, which was applied in systematic analysis of human behaviour at the workplace. Hugo Munsterberg (1863–1916) later contributed to the development of human factor concept when he pioneered in the application of the science of psychology. Munsterberg studied engineers operating new machineries in the United States between 1900 and 1914 (Price 2007). Taylor and Munsterberg’s concepts were applied in studies that determined the relations of work hours and employee motivation during the World War I (Price 2007). Between 1923 and 1933, Hawthorne used the concepts developed until then to determine correlation between productivity and worker environment. The concept of human factors was first applied to work environment at the Western Electric Company in Chicago between 1920s and 1940s. Human factors approaches were afterwards absorbed across the United States in 1950s and 1960s. This generated much influential theories such as Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y that are used today (Price 2007). Several researchers who examined the etymology of the term "human error" arrived at a consensus that the origin of the term cannot be ascertained (Hansen, 2006; Shavers, 2009). According to Hansen (2006), the use of the concept by politician, authors and industrial experts provide a clue that the concept originated from the Latin phrase errare est humanum, which means to error is human. President Thomas Jefferson also used the term in his 1775 work (later published in 1950) called “The Refutation of the argument that Colonies were Established at the Expenses of the British Nation” to denote that error is human weakness (Hansen, 2006). Hansen (2006) cited Nidditch (1979) to point out that British philosopher John Locke had also used the term to denote that "all men are liable to error." John Locke in his work "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" that was published in 1999 (first published in 1690) explained that error is not a fault of human knowledge but a mistake of human judgment (Lock, 1999). The term "human error" is also believed to have originated in the aviation industry during the Second World War, although advances that led to its coining go back to earlier than the 20th century. Before the Second World War, industries focused on “designing humans to fit machines” through trial and errors, during the war, focused changed to "designing the human to fit machines” (Hansen, 2006). Introduction Human factors describe the organisational, environmental and job factors that influence individual and group behaviour hence affecting health and safety. In essence, they relate to how environmental factors relate to individuals and the tasks they carry out within an organisation. Understanding such a relationship is critical in ensuring that the work environment is supportive of human interaction as well as appreciates that errors are likely to be made. Studies have shown that human factors maintain the most predominant influence over group and individual behaviour in an organisation. In essence therefore, the key objective of human factors is to create tolerance to error. HSE (1999) categorises human factors into individual factors, which consist of low competence levels and skills, job factors such as high workload, and organisational factors such as poor work planning. Of the three, organisational factors are the most important element since worker involvement is integral across an organisation’s life cycle, from initiation through liquidation. Additionally, most organisational inefficiencies are also attributed to actions related to individual omissions or actions that are directly involved in maintenance or operational work. Organisational Factors An organization is composed of individuals with various designated tasks who seek to accomplish a common goal or organisational objective. Fischer et al. (2005) pointed out that organisational goals and objectives may include ensuring productivity and efficiency. Safety is also a critical factor for an organisation. Realising these objectives however depends on organisational behaviour (Givens 2008; Clancy n.d.). Organisational factors significantly influence organisational behaviour. Therefore, an organisational climate needs to embrace health and safety culture. The climate has to promote involvement of the workforce in ensuring safety as well as commitment to safety standards (HSE 1999). The focus of organisational factors is therefore on using the most effective ways to manage the organization, and its processes, groups and individuals (Dartey-Baah and Amponsah-Tawiah 2011). Understanding organisational factors is central to gaining deeper insight into the factors influencing group and individual dynamics within an organisational setting so as the organisation can become safer and more productive (George & Jones 2006). Understanding the factors is therefore essential for promoting desirable behaviours that can promote safety culture. Several organisational factors are associated with organisational safety performance. These include organisational learning, mission statement, organisational management, job satisfaction, individual differences, level of information technology expertise, organisational culture, organizational design and learning. Human errors Analysis of human errors and their significance in industrial accidents is a vital part of developing systematic methods for ensuring risk prediction and industrial reliability. The term is defined in reference to the externally faulty task elements (Manzoor & Shi-Yin, 2011). According to Leplast and Rasmussen (1984), human error refers to people’s behaviours and decisions that cause undesirable gap between expected and unexpected or actual state, which may cause potential of actual negative yet avoidable consequences within the organization. Zhao and Olivera (2006) identified three types of human errors, namely rules-based mistakes, slips and knowledge-based mistake. Slips refer to action that are not carried out according to plan, rules-based mistakes occur when recognised procedures are not followed while knowledge-based mistakes happen when individuals cannot properly analyse or recognise a failure or a problem. Organizational Leadership Leaders make the difference between organisational failure and efficiency. They also influence employees towards a particular course. It entails coping with change or establishing a direction by developing visions for the future. Leaders play a critical role in ensuring that employees adopt a favourable organisational culture, which consists of a system of shared meaning in an organisation’s internal environment. Hence, leadership has a significant function in shaping organizational behaviour (Givens 2008). Dartey-Baah and Amponsah-Tawiah (2011) also pointed out that organizational culture influences the “feel of the organisation.” The researchers further elaborated that organisational culture that leaders influence consists of a powerful force that influences the long-term success and the general effectiveness of an organisation. In turn, leadership may influence employees to adopt safety culture by communicating a vision for an accident free organisation and inspiring employees to comply with safety standards. Leaders may as well influence an organisation adversely by creating barriers to change (Popper & Lipshitz 1998). For instance, employees will always behave in a manner that the leadership encourages. If the leaders emphasise that they adopt safety standards, then they will always comply with the regulations. However, if the leadership permits employees to work without wearing safety equipment such as gloves and boots when working within the plant, then employees will adopt the same trend. However, is failure on the part of organisational leadership enough to indicate that organisations should learn from accidents? Organizational Communication Effective organisational communication entails ensuring timely collection, storage and dissemination of information. It entails passing to the employees changes within the organisations. Effective communication ensures effective coordination of roles. The employees also become aware of the pitfalls within the organisations and know how to respond to it. Communication is a critical organisational factor that affects individual and group employee behaviour. The impacts can be negative or positive depending on the organisation’s communication strategy (Lumley et al. 2011). It can also improve individual competence and eventually organisational efficiency (Dartey-Baah & Amponsah-Tawiah 2011). Communication problems may affect the capacity of the employees to respond to safety concerns. For instance, in instances where the management fails to update changes in the safety standards, the employees become prone to making errors. However, can effective communication solely reduce human errors? Ineffective supervision Ineffective supervision is intimately related to organisational inefficiencies and tendency by workers to overlook codes of conduct or safety regulation. Studies have linked ineffective supervision to poor employee performance and response to organisational needs (Oghvbu, n.d.). Good supervision is interpersonal and involves having a close relationship with the employees. The response and assistance aspect involves establishing positive and subordinate relationship with focus on directing employee behaviour towards high safety performance. Hence, supervisors have an integral role in ensuring safety at workplace. Ineffective supervision may leave them from pursuing the right course or from accepted safety standards. Ineffective supervision may also imply piling too much pressure on employees that may cause depression. Jim et al. (2013) pointed out that negative or discrete emotion such as depression, anxiety and anger increase employee dissatisfaction and willingness to pursue deviant behaviour within the organization. Jim et al. (2013) discussed the leader-member exchange (LMX) theory that explains the quality of relationship between the management and employees. According to the theory, when managers show employees that they care, the employees become more productive (Price 2007). For instance, too much pressure on the employees can create an environment of distraction as well as deficiency in time, which may increase likelihood of human errors. Too much pressure may also cause mental and physical health impact to some employees as well as increase infringement of health and safety regulations. On the other hand, when the supervisors show commitment to employees’ safety concerns, a positive health and safety culture is promoted. Such a commitment can motivate employees to adapt high levels of health and safety culture across the organisation. The supervisors can show this level of commitment in establishing a positive relationship with the employees by investing in safety gear and equipment to show its commitment to employee safety (Clancy 2011). However, can effective supervision work to govern and accomplish all activities essential for controlling accident risks? Clarity of roles and responsibilities Clarifying the roles and responsibilities of the employees involves redefining what workers and machines do. Failure to communicate the changed roles and responsibilities may cause confusion at the workplace as employees are not informed of what the organisation expects from them. Defining roles and responsibilities at work the workplace can influence the human behaviour within the organisation as well as self-initiative, self-discipline and restraint. Defining roles and responsibilities plays a critical role in ensuring the effectiveness of an organisation’s workforce. Hence, the management is obligated to embrace the organisation’s core values to ensure that employees know what safety-related behaviours are expected from them (King and Lawley 2013). King and Lawley (2013) indicated that clarity of roles and responsibilities can be ensured through the organisation’s mission statement. Having a mission statement that promotes safety goals may influence the employees to practice high health and safety standards as well as show commitment to work. Expectancy theory hypothesises that the quality of employees’ efforts or willingness to display positive behaviour is influenced by the outcomes they expect to receive. According to the theory, members of an organisation will always be motivated when they feel that their efforts can result to an acceptable standard performance within the organisation and that the value of their efforts will fulfil a key objective within the organisation. Jim et al. (2013) proposed that for organisation to influence employee behaviour through the mission statement, the desired behaviour and roles and responsibilities of the workers should be defined clearly in the statement. For instance, in organisations with no clearly defined roles and responsibilities of workers towards achieving safety, employees may tend to believe that high health and healthy standards imply slower work rates. On the other hand, in an organisation where the positive health and safety culture is clearly emphasised through a mission statement, health and safety may not be compromised. King and Lawley (2013) discussed that managers can use mission statements to effect a change of espoused beliefs within the organisation. By defining the roles and responsibilities using mission statements, managers have an opportunity to explicitly define the health and safety objective of the organisation and to enhance a behaviour that all employees, customers and stakeholders can buy into. However, can clarity of roles and responsibilities of employees change influence risk tolerance behaviour? Ineffective auditing Internal safety auditing can be a vital tool for high safety performance. It is the primary means for continuously an organisation's health and safety management system (HSMS). Indeed, the feedback from auditing is a vital tool for growth of HSMS (Kletz 2001). Ineffective auditing when poorly implemented can cause pitfalls in organisational safety culture. As an organisational factor, ineffective auditing may result when incompetent or less experienced auditors fail to methodically examine or review of organisation’s conditions or situations that risk employee safety. Auditing is an element of HSMS, which are essential for improving the safety performance. Essentially, an auditor identified the risks within the organisation, which are then reviewed to improve the system based on the audit results. The process involves a creating an advanced HSMS that aligns to the organisational activities and objectives, as a result coming up with a more sound system that is responsive to worker safety (Kletz 2001). In the event of incompetent auditing of an organisation’s environment, safety regulations and culture, the organisation’s high-risk behaviour to safety performance may not be identified, subsequently causing catastrophic occurrence. Hence the question, can effective auditing reduce exposure to hazards? Insufficient staffing Adopting cost-cutting measures by employing fewer employees reduces the organisation’s capability to handle work. The result is work overload leading to fatigue, which is a cause for human failures and accidents. Such cost cutting measures potentially affect individual and group behaviours. As stated by Mullins (2010), human behaviour within an organisation is affected by the decisions through which organisational processes are coordinated, controlled, directed or planned. Insufficient staffing also affects the employee’s commitment. This also means that decisions to cut staff may influence how individuals and groups are motivated and stay committed to the tasks (Tsai 2011). The level of job performance may be poor for the fewer workers. At the same time, it may increases the cases of fatigue in the workplace. Safety standards may be compromised due to likely fatigues. However, can having sufficient stuff reduce human failures and accidents? Inadequate response to previous accident Inadequate response to previous incidents and accidents is cause of accidents. Discussions of accidents that have occurred within the organisation are effective in ensuring that employees are informed of corrective actions to previous accidents. The investigating team should record all results of accidents investigations they collect as well as corrective actions (Kletz 2001). The evidence collection should be clearly stated, displayed and conclusions drawn to inform the employees of the organisation’s stand within the organisation. This would enable employees from different background, interests or experiences to learn of the underlying causes of previous accidents to avoid a repeat of the same. For instance, the organisation may use previous accidents as case studies, against which organisational learning is based. According to Torrington, et al (2005), learning can be described as the new or changed behaviour that results from creating new knowledge derived from internal and external experience. As a critical organisational factor, learning is an influential incentive for members of an organisation to adhere to certain organisation. It also substantially affects individual behaviour since it affects the level of motivation, role perception and competences. For instance, when an accident occurs due to failure to operate machinery safely, employees should be made to understand the causes of the accident and what steps should be taken to avert such occurrences in future. However, can failure to coach and mentor employees on how to operate the machinery safely cause for similar accidents in future? Individual differences According to Mullin (2012), an individual is the most significant attribute of organisational behaviour in spite of whether they act in a group or in isolation. Individual characteristics comprise the personality, ability, competencies and attitudes of workers, which interact with the attributes of the job or organisation. The attributes include health and safety culture, job description and work environment. The differences that exist among individuals may sometimes result to conflicting perceptions about safety within the organisation. People therefore show different competencies in handling safety-related issues at work. On the other hand, synergetic unity within the organisation can ensure that individual understand how different safety-related situations can be handled collectively (Dartey-Baah and Amponsah-Tawiah 2011). A prevailing individual difference in the workplace is individual worker attitudes. Workers interpret health and safety differently because of attitudes towards health. This perspective is based on attribution theory, which suggests that to make sense of the environment, individual make inferences on the causes of events and will therefore tend to emphasise that certain individuals tend to judge the behaviour of others as contributing to certain unpleasant events (Mullin 2012). For instance, in situations where a worker is injured or dies after interacting incompetently with a plant, the event may be attributed to lack of competence on certain group of employees or individuals. Development of such attitudes may lead to stereotyping behaviour, where certain groups of workers or individual within the organisation are considered to be careless. To this end, do individual differences threaten safety culture? Job satisfaction Job satisfaction is an organisational factor that influences individual and group behaviour towards tasks and various aspects of the organisation. This type of organisational factor is an aspect that originates from within an individual (Mullins, 2006). It is influenced by personal organisational factors that cause an individual worker’s emotional reactions, in return affecting his commitment to the organisation (Kim 2002). The outcome of job satisfaction includes counter-productive or deviant employee behaviour, productivity and efficient safety performance (Bennet & Robinson 2000). Fagbohungbe & Akinbode (2012) identified organizational deviance that may result from lack of job satisfaction to include absenteeism, aggression, reporting late to work and violence. The severity often depends on the sensation of negative implications an individual links to working under poor work conditions. According to Herzberg’s theory, job satisfaction is influenced by factors within the organization known as; hygiene and motivational factors (Clancy 2011). The theory postulates that hygiene factors are those factors that need to be maintained at sufficient levels and which are related to the environment where an employee works rather than the nature of work. The significant hygiene factors vary from organisational policies to job security to the working conditions (Pearse & Kanyangale 2003). Maintaining these factors at sufficient levels is critical in influencing positive employee behaviour and safety performance (Givens, 2008). For instance, organisations that manufacture highly hazardous processes and which involve using highly risky procedures are vulnerable to having employees who are not motivated to work. This is specifically so when the organisation does nothing to keep the employees satisfied with the job by adopting safety standards, leading to poor job satisfaction triggered by a fear of adverse consequences of working at the organisation. Employee absenteeism and turnover rates may in such a case increase. However, can job satisfaction reduce accident risks? Failure of behavioural-based safety systems to reduce human errors completely From the above discussion, it is clear that behavioural-based safety systems have failed to completely reduce human error. Behaviour-based safety programs consist of a set of programs focused on modification of worker's behaviour to prevent or incidents at workplace (Howe 1998). The rationale for these programs is that the majority of accidents result for unsafe acts. As noted, a combination of ineffective management procedures, oversights in staffing, problems in communication, shortfalls in training and inefficient hazard assessment combine to increase the safety risks. Hence, despite the growing concern for the significance of organisation factors, specifically major accident safety, organisations have failed to address the issues in detail. The focus is mostly on engineering aspects rather than on the human-relates issues. Additionally, it is evident that each successive accident is due to exposure to hazard, or any aspect of activity of technology that produces some level of risk. It can further be argued that engineering controls, elimination and design are more effective for reducing risks compared to other controls such as training, warning, procedures and personal protective equipment. Such underlying causes lie dormant within the organisation until particular conditions set them off to cause major accidents. So what exactly are the basic causes of latent failures? Conclusion and Recommendations Organisational factors maintain the most predominant influence over group and individual behaviour in an organisation. Behaviour-based safety (BBS) approaches can be applied to manage these organisational factors. The method centres on motivating and reinforcing positive organisational behaviour. This may include educating the employees about the significance of safe behaviour, isolating target behaviours, monitoring employee activity, offering feedback to positive change in employee behaviour in the form of recognition and workforce acceptance. Concerning developing work designs or structures, the management may involve employees in designing the program to ensure that it is consistent with employee concerns. To resolve the issues of individual differences, the process of understanding human behaviour within the organisation should be based on the fundamental nature of the relationship between the organisation and its members. For instance, specific factors such as employees’ different cultural background, competencies and levels of literacy should be taken into perspective in designing or creating a fitting behaviour-based safety program. 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