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1 – 10 of 120Ahmad Ghaith, Huimin Ma and Ashraf W. Labib
High-reliability performance and high-hazard are intertwined in High-Reliability Organizations (HROs) operations; these organizations are highly safe, highly hazardous and highly…
Abstract
Purpose
High-reliability performance and high-hazard are intertwined in High-Reliability Organizations (HROs) operations; these organizations are highly safe, highly hazardous and highly significant for the modern society, not only for the valuable resources they have, but also the indispensable services they provide. This research intend to understand how HROs could produce high quality performance despite their challenging and demanding contexts. The research followed an emic approach to develop an organizational framework that reflects the contribution of the seeming traits of the organizations to the operations safety based on the workers point of views about the safety of workstations.
Design/methodology/approach
This research adopted mixed methods of in-depth interviews and literature review to identify the structural characteristics of high-reliability organizations (HROs) embedded in the organizations studies and developed a theoretical based structural framework for HROs. Furthermore, a systemic literature review was adopted to find the evidence from the organizations literature for the identified characteristics from the interviews from the first stage. The setting for this study is six Chinese power stations, four stations in Hubei province central China and two stations in the southern China Guangdong province.
Findings
The organizational framework is a key determinant to achieve high-reliability performance; however, solely it cannot explain how HROs manage the risks of hazard events and operate safely in high-hazard environments. High-reliability performance is attributed to the interaction between two sets of determinants of safety and hazard. The findings of this research indicate that HROs systems would be described as reliable or hazardous depending on the tightly coupled setting, complexity, bureaucracy involvement and dynamicity within the systems from one hand, and safety orientation, failure intolerance, systemwide processing, the institutional setting and the employment of redundant systems on other hand.
Originality/value
The authors developed an organizational framework of organizing the safety work in HROs. The applied method of interviewing and literature review was not adopted in any other researches.
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The purpose of this paper is to complicate and critique contemporary scholarship on high-reliability organizations (HROs). This paper argues that although HRO scholarship helps to…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to complicate and critique contemporary scholarship on high-reliability organizations (HROs). This paper argues that although HRO scholarship helps to identify communicative patterns that facilitate reliability and safety, it also simplifies processes that undermine the effectiveness of existing recommendations for HROs.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper frames high-reliability organizing as the enactment of mindfulness, which is the theoretical mechanism behind each of the five principles of high-reliability organizing. Using this framework, this paper then elaborates on each of the HRO principles: preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify interpretations, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and deference to expertise.
Findings
This paper details how research guided by HRO theory must address the following obstacles to safety and resilience: information accessibility limiting preoccupation with failure, identity constructions encouraging the simplification of interpretations, message fatigue repressing sensitivity to operations, the information environment within HROs weakening commitment to resilience, and generational differences impeding deference to expertise.
Originality/value
This paper highlights key issues obstructing safety and reliability in organizations that have been largely ignored by extant literature and encourages scholars to do more to acknowledge the role communication plays in constituting and reconstituting organizational reliability. Failing to fully address complex communicative interactions in HROs obstructs efforts to safeguard employee health and safety.
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Klaus-Peter Schulz, Silke Geithner and Peter Mistele
Manufacturing companies increasingly have to deal with uncertainty and complexity without being sufficiently prepared for it. High-reliability organizations (HROs) successfully…
Abstract
Purpose
Manufacturing companies increasingly have to deal with uncertainty and complexity without being sufficiently prepared for it. High-reliability organizations (HROs) successfully deal with dynamic and unknown situations. The authors ask the question whether learning concepts of HROs can be a role model for manufacturing companies and if their learning principles can be successfully applied there. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors’ research is based on high-reliability theory and former qualitative empirical studies on learning and development of mission-based HRO. The authors compare their learning practice with learning and development demands of the own empirical cases studies of three manufacturing firms.
Findings
Learning concepts in the manufacturing firms are disconnected from their practical demands. In HRO in contrast, learning and development follows a distinct choreography, with a focus on collective reflection. Manufacturing firms can learn from HROs about learning principles especially with respect to collective reflection-on-action in order to develop situational awareness. However, the HROs’ learning should not be seen as a strict role model as their work organization differs significantly from that of manufacturing firms.
Research limitations/implications
The research is based on in-depth case analyses (e.g. interviews and observation). The outcomes are case specific and focus on manufacturing firms. Hence, only patterns or principles can be generalized. To gain a more complete picture, the authors suggest further case analyses in different industries.
Practical implications
Manufacturing firms can benefit from learning principles of HROs, like combining formal and informal learning and collective reflection on practice.
Originality/value
The paper connects previous research on HRO with original empirical research on manufacturing firms. Through the matching of data, the authors contribute to the discussion on whether the concept of HROs can be seen as a role model for learning and development in manufacturing firms.
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Emmanuel Sawyerr and Christian Harrison
The purpose of this study is to identify the prescribed formative elements of supply chain resilience (SCR) in literature, to compare them with the unique characteristics of high…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to identify the prescribed formative elements of supply chain resilience (SCR) in literature, to compare them with the unique characteristics of high reliability organisations (HROs) and derive lessons useful for improving SCR.
Design/methodology/approach
Two systematic literature reviews are carried out as follows: one on SCR and the other on HRO, which identified 107 studies and 18 papers, respectively. The results from the review are presented, analysed and synthesised.
Findings
Findings suggest that despite significant similarities in some of the proposed formative elements for SCR and the characteristics of HROs, the strong managerial commitment exhibited in HROs is absent in SCR literature. More importantly, the most cited characteristic of HROs, which is their flexible decision making structure is pointed out as a prima lesson towards developing resilience in supply chains.
Practical implications
A decision making framework to facilitate flexible decision making for supply chains during crisis is presented. Further, practical lessons are pointed out from principles common to both streams of literature such as redundancy, human resource management, collaboration, agility, flexibility, culture and risk avoidance that can be implemented in supply chains.
Originality/value
This paper is the first study to systematically review HROs, adapt a HRO decision making framework and also apply the Cynefin framework to SCR. This, therefore, provides the basis to launch further research into the use of these theories and the role of decision-making in SCR creation.
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The purpose of this paper is to expand understandings of interorganizational collaboration among high reliability organizations (HROs). It proposes that HROs face unique needs for…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to expand understandings of interorganizational collaboration among high reliability organizations (HROs). It proposes that HROs face unique needs for relationship building, pre-planning, and retrospective sensemaking that do not fit within prior models of collaboration. For HROs, definitions of collaboration vary contextually based on needs that arise during emergency situations. HROs have a need for both hierarchical structure and collaborative processes and use collaboration as a sensemaking frame that allows practitioners to attend to both needs.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper uses a case study from an ongoing ethnographic study of an emergency response collaboration. The paper uses open-ended interviews about collaboration with all key members of the incident response hierarchy, and participant observation of collaboration before, during and after a key emergency incident.
Findings
The paper proposes a new framework for HRO collaboration: that collaboration is a sensemaking frame for HROs used to make sense of individual actions, that HRO collaboration is more complex during pre-planning and focused on individual decision making during incidents, and that members can communicatively make sense of the need for hierarchy and collaborative action by defining these needs contextually.
Research limitations/implications
The paper uses an in-depth case study of an incident to explore this collaborative framework; therefore, researchers are encouraged to test this framework in additional high reliability collaborative contexts.
Practical implications
The paper includes implications for best communicative practices to recognize the need to be both hierarchical and flexible in high reliability organizing.
Originality/value
This paper fulfills a need to expand collaboration literature beyond idealized and egalitarian definitions, in order to understand how practitioners use communication to understand their actions as collaborative, especially in organizations that also require hierarchy and individual actions. This case study suggests that collaboration as a sensemaking frame creates collaborative advantages for HROs, but can also limit sensemaking about incident management.
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Maryam Memar Zadeh and Nicole Haggerty
Long-term care (LTC) organizations have struggled to protect their vulnerable clients from the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although various suggestions on containing…
Abstract
Purpose
Long-term care (LTC) organizations have struggled to protect their vulnerable clients from the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although various suggestions on containing outbreaks in LTC facilities have gained prominence, ensuring the safety of residents is not just a crisis issue. In that context, the authors must reasses the traditional management practices that were not sufficient for handling unexpected and demanding conditions. The purpose of this paper is to suggest rethinking the underlying attributes of LTC organizations and drawing insight from the parallels they have to high-reliability organizations (HROs).
Design/methodology/approach
The authors analyzed qualitative data collected from a Canadian LTC facility to shed light on the current state of reliability practices and culture of the LTC industry and to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the traditional management approaches.
Findings
To help the LTC industry develop the necessary crisis management capacity to tackle unexpected future challenges, there is an urgent need for adopting a more systemic top-down approach that cultivates mindfulness, learning and resilience.
Originality/value
This study contributes by applying the HRO theoretical lens in the LTC context. The study provides the LTC leaders with insights into creating a unified effort at the industry level to give rise to a high-reliability-oriented industry.
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Carolina Acedo Darbonnens and Malgorzata Zurawska
Crisis management (CM) has gained prominence in the last decades, as the complex global business environment has forced executives to pay attention to practices that may safeguard…
Abstract
Crisis management (CM) has gained prominence in the last decades, as the complex global business environment has forced executives to pay attention to practices that may safeguard organizations against potential crises. However, despite the fact that various scholars point to the need for autonomy and delegation of authority when responding to crises, it appears that the overarching rationale in the crisis literature is geared toward a centralized approach. This suggests that preventive actions and response to crises lie mainly with the leader of the organization and with designated crises teams. It is also apparent that this literature places too much weight on contingency plans and classification schemes. Although behavioral factors have been discussed by some authors as a fundamental element in dealing with crises, it is not clear how to develop these traits. It is our contention then that these conventional perspectives, although valuable to CM, are insufficient to deal with the uncertainty that characterizes global business today where firms must be prepared for the unexpected. We discuss the limitations of this traditional approach and argue for a combination of central control with decentralized execution when responding to unexpected crises situations. This enables management to better comprehend the complexity embedded in any crisis and allows adaptive practices to emerge throughout the organization. An analysis of two cases paired with empirical field studies support our proposition.
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Andrew Waguih Ishak and Elizabeth Ann Williams
Organizations of all types desire to be imbued with resilience, or the ability to withstand and bounce back from difficult events (Richardson, 2002; Walsh 2003). But resilience…
Abstract
Purpose
Organizations of all types desire to be imbued with resilience, or the ability to withstand and bounce back from difficult events (Richardson, 2002; Walsh 2003). But resilience does not play the same role in every organization. Previous research (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2011) has argued that organizations can be more or less resilient. For high reliability organizations (HROs) such as fire crews and emergency medical units, resilience is a defining feature. Due to the life-or-death nature of their work, the ability to be successful in the face of difficult events is imperative to the process of HROs. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a theory piece.
Findings
The authors put forth a dual-spectrum model that introduces adaptive and anchored approaches to organizational resilience.
Research limitations/implications
There are organizations for which resilience is only enacted when the organization must overcome difficult events. And at the other end are organizations that may not enact resilience in difficult times, and therefore fail or deteriorate. But while it has been shown that organizations can be more or less resilient, there has been little attention paid to how organizations may have differing types of resilience.
Originality/value
In this piece, the authors theorize that resilience may differ in type between organizations. Drawing on theoretical approaches to resilience from communication (Buzzanell, 2010), organizational behavior (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2011), and motivational psychology (Dweck, 2016), the authors introduce a model that views resilience as a dynamic construct in organizations. The authors argue that an organization’s resilience-centered actions affect – and are determined by – its approach to Buzzanell’s (2010) five communicative processes of resilience. The authors offer testable propositions, as well as theoretical and practical implications from this model, not only for HROs, but for all organizations.
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Jordan C. Pickering and David A. Klinger
Drawing from literature on organizations that function efficiently and effectively while maintaining low levels of errors and occupational injuries and deaths, we argue that…
Abstract
Purpose
Drawing from literature on organizations that function efficiently and effectively while maintaining low levels of errors and occupational injuries and deaths, we argue that police departments can enhance their legitimacy by adopting the practices found in such organizations because doing so can reduce the frequency of unnecessary force against citizens and lower officer injury rates.
Methodology/approach
To support our argument, we review literatures on the causes and avoidance of errors in organizations, identify how well-run organizations in high-risk environments are able to operate safely, and describe how police departments can adopt similar practices as a mechanism to enhance officer safety and lower the rate at which officers use force against citizens.
Findings
By adopting the practices of successful organizations in other fields, police departments and their officers can promote and enhance their safety while simultaneously reducing their use of force against citizens. By doing so, police can raise the level of legitimacy they hold in the eyes of the American public, which has arguably decreased in the wake of recent events involving police gunfire.
Originality/value
Our ideas contribute to the policing literature by: (1) highlighting a preexisting body of literature and outlining its application to police organizations and (2) detailing how both the police and the public can benefit from improved police practices.
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Evan H. Offstein, Raymond Kniphuisen, D. Robin Bichy and J. Stephen Childers Jr
Recent lapses in the management of high hazard organizations, such as the Fukushima event or the Deepwater Horizon blast, add considerable urgency to better understand the…
Abstract
Purpose
Recent lapses in the management of high hazard organizations, such as the Fukushima event or the Deepwater Horizon blast, add considerable urgency to better understand the complicated and complex phenomena of leading and managing high reliability organizations (HRO). The purpose of this paper is to offer both theoretical and practical insight to further strengthen reliability in high hazard organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
Phenomenological study based on over three years of research and thousands of hours of study in HROs conducted through a scholar-practitioner partnership.
Findings
The findings indicate that the identification and the management of competing tensions arising from misalignment within and between public policy, organizational strategy, communication, decision-making, organizational learning, and leadership is the critical factor in explaining improved reliability and safety of HROs.
Research limitations/implications
Stops short of full-blown grounded theory. Steps were made to ensure validity; however, generalizability may be limited due to sample.
Practical implications
Provides insight into reliably operating organizations that are crucial to society where errors would cause significant damage or loss.
Originality/value
Extends high reliability research by investigating more fully the competing tensions present in these complex, societally crucial organizations.
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