scholarly journals Pragmatic Leadership Practices in Dangerous Contexts: High-Reliability Organizations (HRO) for Pandemic COVID-19

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (8) ◽  
pp. 109-117
Author(s):  
Daved van Stralen ◽  
Sean McKay ◽  
Thomas Mercer

The threat of COVID-19 to professionals has become personal. Professionals in neonatal healthcare can acquire infection and unknowingly become a vector, infecting babies, and their colleagues. A pragmatic stance of leadership, derived from leadership in extremis, communicates to subordinates that leaders have their immediate well-being in mind while engaging in demanding situations. Effective leadership for ill-structured problems embedded in the environment has distinct characteristics such as modeling cognitive and affective skills (attitudes and the contingent value of information) and the ability to modulate emotional states. Pragmatic leaders effectively increase subordinates' collective stress capacity for, and leverage individual capabilities during, in extremis circumstances. This paper describes pragmatic leadership characteristics and practices derived from experience, primary sciences, and High Reliability Organizations (HRO).

Author(s):  
Tiffany M. Bisbey ◽  
Molly P. Kilcullen ◽  
Eduardo Salas

In the tumultuous and unprecedented times of the 21st century, resilience is more important than ever for organizational success. High-reliability organizations (HROs) are known for their ability to operate effectively in high-risk contexts by preventing avoidable crises and maintaining resilience when challenges arise. In the psychology literature, resilience is the phenomenon of overcoming adversity with minimal negative impact to performance and well-being. Although the study of psychological resilience began at the individual level, researchers are beginning to adopt a multilevel perspective of the construct that accounts for resilience at the team and organizational levels. While the science of HROs has been studied for several decades, research on psychological resilience in the workplace has only just begun to flourish by comparison. There are many lessons for creating and maintaining resilience that can be learned from the successful practice of HROs. HROs have systems of layered defenses in place that allow the organization to prevent precluded events and overcome the potential negative impact of adverse conditions and near misses. Organizations that conduct work in high-risk contexts may be able to model the success of HROs by keeping learning foremost, investing time and resources into team training, supporting a climate of psychological safety, coaching employees to keep performance objectives in focus, and practicing systems thinking and accounting for complexity in resource allocation. Maintaining resilience is not a duty outlined in a formal job description, yet it is undoubtedly important for enabling effective high-risk work. Going above and beyond the formal definition of roles may be the only route to effectiveness in these organizations.


2008 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 146-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meinrad Perrez ◽  
Michael Reicherts ◽  
Yves Hänggi ◽  
Andrea B. Horn ◽  
Gisela Michel ◽  
...  

Abstract. Most research in health psychology is based on retrospective self reports, which are distorted by recall biases and have low ecological validity. To overcome such limitations we developed computer assisted diary approaches to assess health related behaviours in individuals’, couples’ and families’ daily life. The event- and time-sampling-based instruments serve to assess appraisals of the current situation, feelings of physical discomfort, current emotional states, conflict and emotion regulation in daily life. They have proved sufficient reliability and validity in the context of individual, couple and family research with respect to issues like emotion regulation and health. As examples: Regarding symptom reporting curvilinear pattern of frequencies over the day could be identified by parents and adolescents; or psychological well-being is associated with lower variability in basic affect dimensions. In addition, we report on preventive studies to improve parental skills and enhance their empathic competences towards their baby, and towards their partner.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Seibel

This article addresses the question of to what extent conventional theories of high reliability organizations and normal accidents theory are applicable to public bureaucracy. Empirical evidence suggests precisely this. Relevant cases are, for instance, collapsing buildings and bridges due to insufficient supervision of engineering by the relevant authorities, infants dying at the hands of their own parents due to misperceptions and neglect on the part of child protection agencies, uninterrupted serial killings due to a lack of coordination among police services, or improper planning and risk assessment in the preparation of mass events such as soccer games or street parades. The basic argument is that conceptualizing distinct and differentiated causal mechanisms is useful for developing more fine-grained variants of both normal accident theory and high reliability organization theory that take into account standard pathologies of public bureaucracies and inevitable trade-offs connected to their political embeddedness in democratic and rule-of-law-based systems to which belong the tensions between responsiveness and responsibility and between goal attainment and system maintenance. This, the article argues, makes it possible to identify distinct points of intervention at which permissive conditions with the potential to trigger risk-generating human action can be neutralized while the threshold that separates risk-generating human action from actual disaster can be raised to a level that makes disastrous outcomes less probable.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew S. Fox ◽  
Regina Lapate ◽  
Alexander J. Shackman ◽  
Richard J Davidson

Emotion is a core feature of the human condition, with profound consequences for health, wealth, and wellbeing. Over the past quarter-century, improved methods for manipulating and measuring different features of emotion have yielded steady advances in our scientific understanding emotional states, traits, and disorders. Yet, it is clear that most of the work remains undone. Here, we highlight key challenges facing the field of affective sciences. Addressing these challenges will provide critical opportunities not just for understanding the mind, but also for increasing the impact of the affective sciences on public health and well-being.


Author(s):  
Michèle Rieth ◽  
Vera Hagemann

ZusammenfassungBasierend auf einer Arbeitsfeldbetrachtung im Bereich der Flugsicherung in Österreich und der Schweiz liefert dieser Artikel der Zeitschrift Gruppe. Interaktion. Organisation. (GIO) einen Überblick über automatisierungsbedingte Veränderungen und die daraus resultierenden neuen Kompetenzanforderungen an die Beschäftigten im Hochverantwortungsbereich. Bestehende Tätigkeitsstrukturen und Arbeitsrollen verändern sich infolge zunehmender Automatisierung grundlegend, sodass Organisationen neuen Herausforderungen gegenüberstehen und sich neue Kompetenzanforderungen an Mitarbeitende ergeben. Auf Grundlage von 9 problemzentrierten Interviews mit Fluglotsen sowie 4 problemzentrierten Interviews mit Piloten werden die Veränderungen infolge zunehmender Automatisierung und die daraus resultierenden neuen Kompetenzanforderungen an die Beschäftigten in einer High Reliability Organization dargestellt. Dieser Organisationskontext blieb bisher in der wissenschaftlichen Debatte um neue Kompetenzen infolge von Automatisierung weitestgehend unberücksichtigt. Die Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass der Mensch in High Reliability Organizations durch Technik zwar entlastet und unterstützt werden kann, aber nicht zu ersetzen ist. Die Rolle des Menschen wird im Sinne eines Systemüberwachenden passiver, wodurch die Gefahr eines Fähigkeitsverlustes resultiert und der eigene Einfluss der Beschäftigten abnimmt. Ferner scheinen die Anforderungen, denen sie sich infolge zunehmender Automatisierung gegenüberstehen sehen, zuzunehmen, was in einem Spannungsfeld zu ihrer passiven Rolle zu stehen scheint. Die Erkenntnisse werden diskutiert und praktische Implikationen für das Kompetenzmanagement und die Arbeitsgestaltung zur Minimierung der identifizierten restriktiven Arbeitsbedingungen abgeleitet.


Author(s):  
Christopher Nemeth ◽  
Richard Cook

System performance in healthcare pivots on the ability to match demand for care with the resources that are needed to provide it. High reliability is desirable in organizations that perform inherently hazardous, highly technical tasks. However, healthcare's high variability, diversity, partition between workers and managers, and production pressure make it difficult to employ essential aspects of high reliability organizations (HROs) such as redundancy and extensive training. A different approach is needed to understand the nature of healthcare systems and their ability to perform and survive under duress; in other words, to be resilient. The recent evolution of resilience engineering affords the opportunity to configure healthcare systems so that they are adaptable and can foresee challenges that threaten their mission. Information technology (IT) in particular can enable healthcare, as a service sector, to adapt successfully, as long as it is based on cognitive systems engineering approaches to achieve resilient performance.


Risk Analysis ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 26 (5) ◽  
pp. 1123-1138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue Cox ◽  
Bethan Jones ◽  
David Collinson

1975 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-35
Author(s):  
Wayne W. Dyer ◽  
John Vriend

Effectively understanding and counseling the chronic drug user and others who are dependent upon agents and substances outside themselves to bring about affects of well being and more positive emotional states in their lives requires that the counselor understand how emotions and sensations occur, and what their relationship is to internal and external thinking. The authors present a paradigm of external and internal thinking as these apply as causes for positive and negative emotional shifts. The concepts of internally and externally oriented thinking and behaving are discussed, and these are related to counseling the dependent drug user. Finally, strategies for dealing with the dependent drug user, always an externally oriented person, are presented.


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