Commentary

Improving teamwork and safety: Toward a practical systems approach, a commentary on Deneckere et al.

As health care leaders, we often pull staff together to review a process or work on a variety of projects. Think back to the last project you asked staff members to work on. Were they working as a group or a team? Words shape everything: our perception, perspective, the worth of the collective group and the product it produces. The literature uses the terms group and team interchangeably just as many leaders do. Until we define a word, it can have a variety of meanings. The fundamental factors that distinguish between groups and teams are very different, and the distinction between the two is very important. Learning the difference between a group and a team will afford you, as a leader, success in relationships with your staff, project sustainment, and staff members that will naturally rise to leadership roles. All teams are groups; however, not all groups are teams. The purpose of this article is to define the term team and identify strategies nurse leaders can use to effectively develop, analyze, and support high-functioning, collaborative teams.

This study aims to evaluate Occupational Health and Safety (OH&S) Officer’s perceptions of the relationship between leadership empowerment behaviour (LEB) and psychological empowerment (PE) leading to safety teamwork with the production team. Based on the lists of competent OH&S officers exhibited in the Malaysia Ministry of Human Resource’s website, the participants were recruited. The proposed conceptual model was validated by first- and second-order confirmatory factor analysis of structural equation modelling (SEM). The results indicate a weak construct relationship between leadership empowering behaviour and officer’s psychological empowerment. Furthermore, the findings on psychological empowerment were partially mediated. A proposed strategy for further study was recommended to confirm the PE mediating effect. Overall, effective safety teamwork in the manufacturing industry relates to the officer’s psychological empowerment, safety commitment, and perceived organisational support.

With the development of technological innovation, many industries such as process and maritime industries constitute more complex automated systems, dedicated operating conditions, multilevel interconnections, as well as human-machine and human-human interactions. The actions and decisions made by operators and seafarers affect the safety and productivity of these systems. It is well known that around 60-80% of the accidents are attributed to human error (directly or indirectly). Generally, each operator or seafarer is must undergo training before starting their real jobs. In recent decades, emphasis on operator training has increased – resulting in advance training simulators with several features like immersivity, stereoscopic sounds, hydraulics, and even use of different odors. However, the design of training methodology can have a significant impact on the skill acquisition of trainees. The growth of integration of technology in existing systems as well as newer systems is much higher than that of improvement in training methods. Unfortunately, there are few studies linking the training needs and the real-world demands on operators, revealing a significant research gap to fulfill.In socio-complex systems, it is necessary to consider various aspects in the training methodology, which can facilitate the operators/seafarers to handle normal and abnormal scenarios adequately. This paper provides a background of current training methods through analyzing the process- and maritime industries as illustrative examples, highlighting the limitations associated with each of different perspectives (technical, psychological and organizational) to propose an training syllabus that allows for learning by experience and interaction with scenarios of different complexity. It consists of a three-stage hierarchy with increasing demands concerning technical and relational complexity and time pressure. The training is centered on handling real-time operations with increasing complexity starting from basic components of the process, advancing to real-time operations, and reaching high technical and relational complexity that needs to be handled in situations with limited time and uncertainty in data. The challenges that arise in team-working tasks are also considered in the conceptualization of the training syllabus. The proposed training syllabus includes training content, objectives and performance evaluation criteria. The systematic methodology of performance evaluation will allow practitioners to obtain transparent, unbiased and consistent certification of trainees.