This document describes a research approach that combines organizational ethnography and agent modeling to better understand organizational safety culture. It involves identifying key actors and factors through interviews and case studies, developing a conceptual model of their interactions, formalizing this into mathematical terms, implementing it as a computer simulation, running simulations to observe emergent results, and using the results to inform new research questions and data gathering. The goal is to capture the complex, emergent nature of how safety commitment develops among various organizational roles under social and organizational influences.

1. Understanding Crises:
Investigating Organizational
Safety Culture by Combining
Organizational Ethnography and
Agent Modeling
David
Passenier
Colin
Mols
Jan
Bím
Alexei
Sharpanskykh

2. Resilient Systems & Safety Culture
Safety Culture Resilient Responses (Weick et al., 1999)
Practices, beliefs, values concerning the safety of a system

3. Resilient Systems & Safety Culture
Safety Culture Resilient Responses (Weick et al., 1999)
Practices, beliefs, values concerning the safety of a system
 Research:
 Relation cultural properties to safety unclear, complex
 Models linear, based on incidents data
 Practice:
 How to improve safety cultures?
Understand development of safety culture.

4. Our Approach:
 Social interactions
 Complex dynamics
 Emergent phenomena
ETHNOGRAPHY
• Rich qualitative data
• Natural settings
AGENT MODELLING
• decision making agents
• simulate interactions

5. Research process
Orientation, research
question, data
gathering strategy
Identification of
involved actors
Identification of
most important
factors
Conceptual
model
Refinement
Formal
model
Implementation Simulations Results
-New questions
-Empirical data
gathering

6. Research process
Orientation, research
question, data
gathering strategy
Identification of
involved actors
Identification of
most important
factors
Conceptual
model
Refinement
Formal
model
Implementation Simulations Results
-New questions
-Empirical data
gathering

7. Orientation phase
- Domain: Aircraft maintenance
- Data gathering: Case study (Atak and
Kingma, 2010), interviews with the author.
- Question: How does the commitment to
safety of maintenance technicians emerge and
develop under social and organizational
influences?
- Management, Quality Assurance,
Aircraft Maintenance Technicians
- Power relations, Social influences,
Decision making
Orientation, research
question, data
gathering strategy
Identification of
involved actors
Identification of
most important
factors

8. Research process
Orientation, research
question, data
gathering strategy
Identification of
involved actors
Identification of
most important
factors.
Conceptual
model
Forma-
lization
Formal
model
Implementation Simulations Results
Conceptual
model
-New questions
-Empirical data
gathering

9. Conceptual model
Forma-
lization
Formal
model
Implementation Simulations Results
Conceptual
model
• All the ideas put together in a concept of the whole mechanism
• The first one was too detailed
• Specific maintenance tasks taken into account
• Problem accessing organizations
• Refined to higher level of abstraction
• Example: performance delivery of an AMT is influenced by all
other AMTs, QA and management

10. Formalization
Forma-
lization
Formal
model
Implementation Simulations Results
Conceptual
model
• Translation of all concept into mathematical terms
• Assignment of meaning to values

11. Formal model
Forma-
lization
Formal
model
Implementation Simulations Results
Conceptual
model
• Set of equations
• Easy to verify
• Easier to implement a formal model than the conceptual
straight away
• Example: Δ𝑝 𝑑 = 𝛼 𝛾𝑒(𝑝 𝑎 − 𝑝𝑒)
𝑒∈𝐺

12. Implementation
Forma-
lization
Formal
model
Implementation Simulations Results
Conceptual
model
• Translation to a programming language (consequently
running software)
• Discretization
• Selection of the representation (e.g. time step size)
• Java
• Example:
• performanceDiff += Math.pow(newAmts.size(), sizeCoefficient) *
influenceSpeed * influenceWeights.get(a) * (a.performanceDelivery
- performanceDelivery) * a_duration;

13. Simulations
Forma-
lization
Formal
model
Implementation Simulations Results
Conceptual
model
• Instantiation of the implementation with certain
parameters
• Select what should be the results
• Run
• Results visualization and analysis (Matlab)
-New questions
-Empirical data
gathering

14. Conclusions
 Emergent phenomena
 Complex not linear
 Based on theory and daily practices
 Practical use: show hidden properties of organizational
culture
Future research:
 Measure for responsibility & commitment
 Idea: Commitment as difference between safety demand
and delivered
 Validation

15. Questions & comments?
 Atak, A. and Kingma, S. (2010) Safety culture in an
aircraft maintenance organisation: A view from the
inside, Safety Science, 49, 268-278.
 Weick, K. E. , Sutcliffe, K.M., and Obstfeld, D. (1999)
Organizing for High Reliability: Processes of
Collective Mindfulness, in Sutton, R.S. and Staw, B.M.
(eds), Research in Organizational Behavior, Volume 1
(pp. 81–123), Jai Press, Stanford.
References