Employees' Willingness to Use Mindful Safety Practices at Norwegian Petroleum Installations. Replication Study. Work Report. "HSE Petroleum: Change - Organization - Technology."

Abstract

This report documents the outcome of a replication study. During 2004 a study, which in the following will be referred to as the original study, was performed to explore what type of contextual factors that might affect employees’ willingness to use mindful safety practices at Norwegian petroleum installations (Skjerve, 2005). The term mindful safety practice was defined as a discrete general safety-promoting work practice that might prevent the initiation of unwanted but not explicitly predefined event sequences and/or interrupt such sequences. The replication study was performed to assess the extent to which the results obtained in the original study could be replicated, and thus to contribute to validate the suggestions made in terms of safety management practices. Both the original and the replication studies were based on data obtained in questionnaire surveys performed by the Petroleum Safety Authority Norway as part of two large-scale studies to assess the risk-level at the Norwegian Shelf. The replication study reproduced the major part of the results obtained in the original study. Taken together the studies suggest that management initiatives to increase employees’ willingness to use mindful safety practices will be most efficient if directed at the local work environment of the employees, rather than at the employees’ individually or at the employees that work on the installation in general. They further suggest that the use of mindful safety practices should be monitored with particular care when employees are transferred to a new local work environment, and when modifications are introduced in their present local work environment.