Organizational culture and nuclear power plant maintenance

carries out different types of work and organizational studies in safety critical domains • Our approach: • Work and organizational psychology theories • Close collaboration with the case organization and the personnel • Typical methods: personnel interviews, surveys, observation of work, personnel seminars, work groups • Focus on how the personnel experience and perceive their work, their organization and safety, and how organizations influence individual behaviour • Interventive in nature, aim to promote discussion and change in the organization 3Teemu Reiman and Pia Oedewald 2006 Organizational psychological approach to safety • Studying individuals and groups in an organizational context • How does the organization (the way the work is organized, tools, procedures, norms etc) influence the individual’s attitudes and conceptions • How do the individual’s attitudes and conceptions influence working practices • How do the working practices influence organizational performance and shape the organizational culture • Turner: disasters are accidents which could not have happened according to the existing framework of thinking (organizational culture) • Vicente (2004, p. 276): ”accidents in complex technological systems don’t usually occur because of an unusual action or an entirely new, one-time threat to safety. Instead, they result from a systematically induced migration in work practices combined with an odd event or coincidence that winds up revealing the degradation in safety that has been steadily increasing all the while” • Focus on e.g. following “normal ” phenomena and their safety consequences in organizations • Normalization of deviance (“normalizing signals of potential danger”) • Local optimization of practices (within subcultures