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The title of this paper is the same as a new book/manual published by ASSE and coauthored by the author and his daughter, Krista S. Geller, Ph.D., who for a decade has worked as a safety professional for three organizations. Her real-world challenges at teaching and leading people-based safety informed the preparation of this book/manual. The label " book/manual" reflects the fact that this scholarship was designed to serve as a training manual for addressing the human dynamics of occupational safety. Seven critical lessons are explained and illustrated, accompanied by discussion questions and behavioral exercises with feedback opportunities. Here I review the seven life lessons on which our new book/manual is founded. Suppose you were asked to define and explain the top seven lessons you have learned about the psychology of safety, whether from a course in introductory psychology or anything you've heard or read regarding the dynamics of human experience, including a behavior-based or people-based safety workshop. Don't choose the most memorable, important, or most researched lessons, rather choose those evidence-based lessons you believe should be taught and disseminated worldwide to benefit the human dynamics of safety, security, and quality of life. Which would you choose? Before reading further, it would be beneficial to ponder this question and derive your own list of seven life lessons. As you read, compare your list with those discussed here, noting similarities and discrepancies. Obviously there's no universal answer to the question: " What are seven crucial life lessons from psychology that could benefit safety and human welfare on a large scale?" Answers will certainly be biased by personal experience, including idiosyncratic reading of diverse literature (including " pop psychology") and varied educational and/or research experiences at an educational or research institution and beyond. The seven life lessons presented here are derived from the author's intensive and extensive study of human dynamicsโfive years in graduate school and 48 years as a teacher and researcher of psychology at Virginia Tech (VT). The first four lessons connect directly to applied behavioral science (ABS) and the remaining three life lessons reflect humanism, a realm of psychology considered by many to be opposite to behavioral science. In fact, some readers will consider the life lessons derived from humanism to be an overly " radical" departure from behaviorism. Yet, a primary aim of this presentation is to convince you that these life-lessons should be accepted and deemed important by everyone in a work culture, from safety professionals and CEO's to the line wage workers, regardless of bias toward a particular domain of psychological science.
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Before specifying seven leadership lessons to enhance employee's efforts to cultivate an injury-free workplace, let's consider some fundamental distinctions between management and leadership. First, anyone can be a safety leader. Not so for a safety manager. Managers are typically assigned their position. To be sure, safety managers can be safety leaders. Distinctions between Management and Leadership The functions and actions of leaders are distinct from those of managers. Realizing these disparities enables us to empathize with the requirements of managers, and appreciate the value of going beyond managing (or directing) people to leading (or inspiring) them. Leaders Focus on Process Managers are typically accountable for outcome numbers. They use outcome numbers to direct the behavior of those who report to them. Most followers or subordinates of managers are assigned their subordinate responsibilities and did not choose their manager. In safety, outcome numbers are based on the relatively rare occurrence of an injury. These numbers (e.g., total recordable injury rate or TRIR) are reactive, reflect failure, and are not diagnostic for prevention. In contrast, safety leaders hold people accountable for accomplishing proactive process activities โ not numerical injury ratesโthat can prevent harm. When improvement in process activities is observed, leaders provide those responsible with positive recognition for their efforts. Those rewarded for their safety proactivity develop a sense of personal responsibility for continuing to make contributions and improvements. Leaders Educate In occupational safety, training is more common than education. Managers want employees to know exactly what they need to do in order to complete a particular task effectively and safely. With a "training" mindset, however, managers can come across as demanding. Their directive: "Do this because I said so," rather than "It's the best way to do it." Education involves explanation. The principles or the rationale behind a particular set of procedures are elucidated for employees. Education answers the "why" question โ why a certain protocol needs to be followed. By extension, it also answers the critical, "What's in it for me?" question. By taking the time to explain rules and procedures, effective educators help people develop self-accountability for a safety action plan rather than doing something a certain way because another personโa manager or supervisorโholds them accountable.
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The achievement and maintenance of an injury-free workplace requires appropriate applications of behavioral and psychological science to improve the human dynamics of an organization and enrich the work culture. This can be accomplished by: a) cultivating actively-caring leadership, b) improving interpersonal communication and behavior-based coaching, c) encouraging a successseeking and growth mindset, d) fostering courage, humility, integrity, and interpersonal trust, e) promoting empathy, systems thinking, and interdependency, f) enhancing perceptions of relevant empowerment, and g) increasing people's self-motivation and self-directed responsibility to actively care for safety. This presentation addresses each of these domains by explaining 25 paradigm shifts needed to optimize intrapersonal, interpersonal, and organizational leadership for safety throughout a work culture. The paradigm shifts are divided into four categories: 1) Foundation principles which define the overall approach to addressing the human side of occupational health and safety, 2) Personal living principles needed to exemplify the qualities of a servant leader for safety, 3) Coaching strategies for helping others avoid personal injury, and 4) Leadership strategies for cultivating a "brother's/sister's-keeper" culture in which everyone looks out for the safety of each other, regardless of one's authority or hierarchical position in the organization. All of the recommended paradigm shifts and methods for attaining them are based on research in the behavioral and psychological sciences.
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Introduction These days, almost every presentation on safety leadership or management includes information about psychology (e.g., people's attitudes, personality, and/or behavior) and culture (e.g., the interpersonal context of the workplace). As a university professor of psychology for 43 years, I view this burgeoning interest in the human dynamics of injury prevention to be extremely encouraging. However, it's discouraging and disappointing to see so much inaccurate information presented about people and their culture. As a result, a number of errors related to managing the human dynamics of safety are consistently made, and these can limit the beneficial impact of any safety-management process calling for authentic engagement of employees. This paper identifies 20 common errors of safety management and specifies ways to correct each. The rationale for each solution is given, along with supportive research available and reference to relevant literature.
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Introduction: What Is Actively Caring? The large-scale and long-term health, safety, and welfare of people requires us to routinely go beyond the call of duty on behalf of others' well-being. We call this "Actively Caring for People" or "AC4P". Research in social psychology1, applied behavior analysis2, and person-based psychology3 provide principles and practical strategies for increasing the occurrence of AC4P behaviors throughout a culture. These are reviewed in this presentation. Figure 1 presents a simple flow chart summarizing a basic approach to culture change. We start a culture-change mission with a vision or ultimate purpose--for example, to achieve an AC4P culture. With group consensus supporting the vision, we develop procedures or action plans to accomplish our mission. These are reflected in process-oriented goals which hopefully activate goal-related behaviors. Indeed, the popular writings of Covey4, Peale 5, Kohn,6 and Deming7 suggest behavior is activated and maintained by self-affirmations, internal motivation, and personal principles or values. However, these authors as well as many motivational consultants miss a key component of human dynamicsโthe power of consequences.
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Interventions to address the human dynamics of injury prevention have improved dramatically since the early 1900s. The first systematic application of psychological science to industrial safety focused on finding the psychological causes of personal injuries. It assumed people were responsible for most close calls and injuries, usually through mental errors caused by anxiety, attitude, fear, stress, personality, or emotional state. Injury reduction was typically attempted by "readjusting" attitude or personality, usually through supervisor counseling or discipline This so-called "psychological approach" held that certain individuals were "accident prone." By removing these workers from risky jobs or by disciplining them to correct their attitude or personality problems, it was thought workplace injuries could be reduced. But this focus on "accident-proneness" was not effective, partly because reliable and valid measurement procedures were not available. Also, the personality factors contributing to "accident proneness" are not probably consistent characteristics or traits within people, but vary from time to time and situation to situation. Enthusiasm for the early "psychological approach" waned because of difficulty of measuring its impact. In addition, the seminal research and scholarship of William Haddon suggested engineering changes held the most promise for large-scale, long-term reductions in injury severity. As the first administrator of the National Highway Safety Bureau (now the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration), Dr. Haddon was able to turn his theory and research into the first federal automobile safety standards. Haddon believed injury is caused by delivering excess energy to the body, and injury prevention depends on controlling that energy. The prevention focus now shifted to engineering and epidemiology, and resulted in developing personal protective equipment (PPE) for work and recreational environments, as well as standards and policy regarding the use of PPE. Haddon's basic theory eventually led to collapsible steering wheels, padded dashboards, head restraints, and air-bags in automobiles. The Three E-Words This brief history of the safety movement in the U.S. explains why engineering is the dominant paradigm in industrial health and safety Over the past several decades, the basic protocol for reducing workplace injury has been to: 1) Design the safest equipment, environmental settings, or protective devices, 2) Educate people regarding the use of the engineering interventions, and 3) Use discipline to enforce compliance with recommended safe work practices.
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Introduction At times, most people need an external accountability intervention to keep them motivated. In the work world, these include time sheets, overtime compensation records, peer-to-peer behavioral observations, public posting of performance indicators, group and individual feedback meetings, and performance appraisals. Psychologists call these "extrinsic motivators," and managers use them to keep employees on track. However, sometimes people develop self-motivation within the context of an extrinsic motivation system. In other words, it's possible to establish conditions that facilitate self-accountability and self-motivation. This paper presents evidence-based ways to make this happen in a work culture, as gleaned from research in the behavioral and social sciences. This is the theme of the author's second narrative coauthored by Bob Veazie, "When no one's watching: Living and leading self-motivation."
Behavior modificationโฆ safety managementโฆ attitude adjustmentโฆ behavior-based safetyโฆ culture changeโฆ cognitive alignmentโฆ person-based safetyโฆ human engineeringโฆ social influence. These are all terms used to address the human dynamics of injury prevention. Each can be linked to a set of principles, procedures, or a consultant's service that defines a particular approach to managing the human side of occupational safety. Each of these terms, and most of the accompanying materials, are insufficient. They are either too narrow and restricting, or too broad and nondirective. Some focus entirely on behavior change, while others attempt to target vague and unobservable aspects of other people, like attitudes and thoughts. Still others have the grandiose notion of directly targeting culture change. All of these approaches are well-intentioned, and none are entirely wrong. The human dynamics of an organization include behaviors, attitudes, cognitions, and the context (or culture) in which these aspects of people occur. However, some approaches are too equivocal or ambiguous to be practical, while others may be practical but are not sufficiently comprehensive. The Solution Is Not New More than a decade ago, I proposed the need to address both behavior-based and person-based factors to improve workplace safety over the long term (Geller, 1994). I called this approach "people-based safety" and proposed substituting empowerment, ownership, and interpersonal trust for more traditional safety jargon like top-down control, compliance, and enforcement. And I accompanied these new people-oriented concepts with practical procedures. My partners at Safety Performance Solutions began implementing these procedures in 1995 under the popular label: "behavior-based safety" (BBS). Systematic evaluations of our implementations have enabled successive refinements of procedures, as well as the discovery of guidelines for increasing effectiveness and the long-term impact of our interventions. We also developed research-based and practical support materials for the behavior-change and culture-enrichment process. Today we call this approach "people-based safety" (PBS). It strategically integrates the best of behavior-based and person-based safety in order to enrich the culture in which people work, thereby improving job satisfaction, work quality and production, interpersonal relationships, and occupational safety and health. The academic label for this approach is "humanistic behaviorism" (Geller, 1995a). This presentation explains the essential principles and procedures of PBS. Let's consider seven underlying principles of PBS, with an emphasis on similarities and differences between PBS and BBS. Seven Basics of People-Based Safety Principle 1: Start with Observable Behavior. Like BBS, PBS focuses on what people do, analyzes why they do it, and then applies a research-supported intervention strategy to improve what people do. The improvement of others results from acting people into thinking differently rather than targeting internal awareness or attitudes so as to think people into acting differently. However, unlike BBS, PBS considers that people can observe their own thoughts and attitudes. Thus, people can think themselves into safer actions. In other words, self-management requires self-talk or thinking as well as self-directed behavior (Watson & Tharp, 2002).
An injury-free workplace requires attention to three basic domains: the environment (including tools, equipment, and climate of the work setting), the person (including attitudes, beliefs, and personalities of the employees), and behavior (including safe and at-risk work practices, as well as intervening for a coworker's safety). These factors are interactive, dynamic, and reciprocal. Influencing one factor eventually has impact on the other two. For example, changes in the environment have indirect effects on peoples' behaviors and attitudes, and behavior change usually results in attitude change and some change in the environment. Thus, to achieve and maintain an injury-free workplace, employees need to address each of these domains daily during the development, implementation, and evaluation of intervention strategies to remove environmental hazards, decrease at-risk behaviors, increase safe behaviors, and provide more user-friendly or ergonomically-sound work stations. People-based safety applies the psychology of human dynamics to enrich the culture in which people work, thereby improving job satisfaction, work quality and production, interpersonal relationships, and occupational health and safety. Most organizations that have implemented a behavior-based observation and feedback process have made great strides in achieving an injury-free workplace. However, the typical behavior-based approach does not address the person domain of safety, including people's attitudes, beliefs, and personalities. People-Based Safety strategically integrates the best of behavior-based and person-based safety, as reflected in the acronym ACTS - Acting, Coaching, Thinking, and Seeing. These components of the next wave in improving the human dynamics of occupational safety are summarized in this paper. The Acting of People-Based Safety Begin with Behavior "Behavior modification"-a top-down, controlling and manipulative term I find obnoxious-does not reflect the behavioral principles of People-Based Safety. But the fact is "behavior modification" is used all too often in the safety and health field. Some people use the term to refer to the popular "behavior-based" approach to industrial safety and health. Others use the label to dismiss the behavior-based approach in favor of strategies that sound better, like improving attitudes, building awareness, changing culture, and optimizing systems. The broad principles of People-Based Safety do in fact address management systems, as well as the inner dimensions of people, such as attitudes and belief. Using people-based principles appropriately builds feelings of self-esteem, personal control, optimism, empowerment, and belongingness. They increase the willingness of workers to actively care for the safety and health of others. People who know these principles would never use the term "behavior modification."
An injury-free workplace requires attention to three basic domains: the environment (including tools, equipment, and climate of the work setting), the person (including attitudes, beliefs, and personalities of the employees), and behavior (including safe and at-risk work practices, as well as intervening for a coworker's safety). These factors are interactive, dynamic, and reciprocal. Influencing one factor eventually has impact on the other two. For example, changes in the environment have indirect effects on peoples' behaviors and attitudes, and behavior change usually results in attitude change and some change in the environment. Thus, to achieve and maintain an injury-free workplace, employees need to address each of these domains daily during the development, implementation, and evaluation of intervention strategies to remove environmental hazards, decrease at-risk behaviors, increase safe behaviors, and provide more user-friendly or ergonomically-sound work stations (cf. Geller, 2001). This presentation focuses on the person (or personality) factors that contribute to the safety performance of an organization. Piles of research in psychology show that personality factors influence behavior. In fact, the first involvement of psychology in safety focused on finding the "injury-prone personality". Methods of studying such a concept varied dramatically over time, and potential explanations for why some people seemed to suffer more injuries than others ranged from chance or "bad luck" to innate personality characteristics or traits. Each of these explanations and their accompanying methodologies suffered flaws, leading to studies that produced inconsistent or ambiguous results (Hadden, Suchman, & Klein, 1964; McKenna, 1983; Shaw & Sichel, 1971). Therefore, data related to the control of injuries with person factors were often misinterpreted, creating miscommunication and confusion among researchers and leading many to scoff at the concept of injury proneness. Nevertheless, the idea that person factors determine unintentional injury resurges in the literature every decade or so, often by a consultant with a new employee selection tool or a researcher identifying prior miscommunications and urging further study. The Low-Hanging Fruit Over the past several decades, safety researchers have largely focused their efforts on environment and behavior factors, mainly because these are readily observable and can be reliably measured. These environmental and management-systems strategies did not fail. They tackled the low-hanging fruit and prevented numerous injuries and fatalities as a result. However, today the context has changed for many leading-edge companies. With environmental conditions and management systems more safety relevant, appropriate attention to the human dynamics of safety (including personality factors) will reap observable benefits. Here we want to provide a context for understanding the role of personality in industrial safety and health. This could provide increased awareness and understanding of the diversity of individual differences related to injury prevention and inform the development of interventions to improve safety-related attitudes and behaviors.
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