By Nathaniel Luce
It wouldn’t take a Dr Stangelove situation for a disastrous incident to occur at a nuclear power plant – human error would be the more likely cause – and yet we remain relatively unconcerned about the risk.
The reason why we tend to discount the risk of human error at highly vulnerable sites, such as aircraft-carrier flight decks, nuclear power control rooms and the like, is that we know we can rely on the extremely dependable people who are employed in these potentially high-risk environments and the workplace culture they personify.
Research from Timothy Vogus at Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University, Naomi Rothman of Lehigh University, and Kathleen Sutcliffe and Karl Weick from Michigan Ross, looks at the factors which motivate individuals to exert the extraordinary effort needed to deliver highly reliable, consistent, error-free performance under trying conditions, and reveals the importance of ‘mindful organizing’ as a key dynamic in these high-pressured settings.
This research increases our understanding of the emotional and social factors behind mindful organizing – a collective capability to detect and correct errors and adapt to unexpected events. It also offers some recommendations around designing work, which could enable the application of mindful organizing in other workplaces – in healthcare for example where, from the Stafford Hospital scandal in the UK to the troubled launch of Healthcare.gov in the US, low levels of mindful organizing have led to catastrophic failures.
The frontline employees that engage in mindful organizing are good at discussing potential sources of failure, questioning assumptions and received wisdom, deferring to the expertise of others, and attempting to solve problems creatively. They are also flexible enough to recognize weak signals of failure and accurate enough to intervene correctly. The challenge is that sustaining the high levels of effort and attentiveness needed to maintain highly reliable performance requires individuals to exhibit behaviour that is beyond the norm psychologically and culturally for human beings.
How do they meet this challenge? The researchers identify two key factors that foster mindful organizing and lead to highly reliable performance: (i) ‘prosocial motivation’ and (ii) ‘emotional ambivalence’.
Prosocial motivation and mindful organizing
Prosocial motivation is about focusing on the needs of others rather than on the self and, in an organizational context, subordinating personal interests to those of a system and its purpose.
Prosocial motivation triggers mindful organizing, so that individuals with an increased awareness of others are motivated to protect colleagues from the potential harm inherent in their work and to have a deep commitment to those benefitting from their efforts. Also, desiring to benefit others leads to an appreciation of other perspectives, enabling individuals to help others more effectively, and through gaining knowledge of other people’s abilities to swiftly mobilize expertise when the unexpected occurs.
Emotional ambivalence and mindful organizing
Being at ease with ambivalence makes individuals more cognitively flexible and receptive to alternative perspectives, which in turn helps them anticipate and react effectively to the unexpected and think more creatively. The researchers contend that emotional ambivalence – the simultaneous experience of contradictory feelings – by creating a balance between caution and confidence, doubt and hope, supports mindful organizing.
Doubt energizes inquiry and a search for understanding, though doubt alone can lead to a debilitating state of fear. Hope, in regard to one’s capacity to overcome challenges, can enable people to face significant obstacles and (allied to understanding) to overcome them. The simultaneous experience of high levels of doubt and hope underpins mindful organizing.
The researchers point out that prosocial motivation and emotional ambivalence are states which can respond to management inducements around job design. Counterintuitively, they do not recommend routinizing individuals’ work. Rather they say that routines can undermine the complexity and tension needed to trigger prosocial motivation and emotional ambivalence and, in turn, mindful organizing.
It is the humility of focusing on others that provides the motivation needed for mindful organizing and highly reliable performance, and this can be encouraged by enabling individuals to experience the full impact of their work. Work roles should be expanded to include following up with beneficiaries – patients who have been restored to health, property owners whose homes have been saved from a fire, or colleagues who have been protected from harm. Jobs should also be designed, not around routines, but in complex and contradictory ways that can create the tension that evokes emotional ambivalence.
These recommended job designs can not only be valuable in extreme high reliability working environments, they can also potentially benefit any organization wherever work is complex and operational reliability critical.
Access the full research paper: The affective foundations of high-reliability organizing, Timothy J. Vogus, Naomi B. Rothman, Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, Karl E. Weick, Journal of Organizational Behavior.
