Identification and Conceptual Modeling for Organizational Factors Affecting Operational Safety Towards Extending Human Reliability Analysis Methods

Organizational Factors (OFs) can affect the likelihood of accidents as well as the severity of their consequences by influencing the actions of individuals at work. Organizational issues are recognized contributors to accidents in several industries, primarily through their influence on the human behaviors of those who ultimately interact with technical systems. Current studies have developed models to quantify the impact of OFs on organizational performance and explore the organizational mechanisms that focus on the systemic and collective nature of organizational behavior. However, these methods lack focus on the explicit impact of OFs on operating crew behavior. In the field of Human Reliability Analysis (HRA), studies aim to assess operating crew errors through Performance Influencing Factors (PIFs), but they give limited consideration to the impact of OFs and rarely examine the underlying organizational mechanisms. To bridge this gap, this paper aims to: 1) develop a comprehensive list of OFs affecting operational safety through an exhaustive literature review and categorize them, 2) provide a model by incorporating these OFs through exploring their distribution in the dimensions of organizational characteristics and organizational structural units. Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) is suggested to be used for establishing the model due to its flexibility as a modeling vehicle for "soft" causal relations. The model is built upon three primary dimensions of organizational characteristics: behavioral, structural, and processes. This model is the first step toward incorporating an OF model into the HRA process, i.e., developing an extended HRA model for complex sociotechnical systems with clear causal mechanisms among OFs and PIFs. The findings of this paper are expected to have broad applications for the risk assessment of socio-technical systems, with consideration given to organizational factors.

Keywords: Organizational factors, Risk modeling, Human Reliability analysis, Organizational structure and processes.