Organizational Correctives for Improving Recognition of Near-Miss Events

Abstract

Despite decades of research on organizational disasters, such events remain too common. Scholars across a wide range of disciplines agree that one of the most viable approaches to preventing such catastrophes is to observe near-misses and use them to identify and eliminate problems before they produce large failures. Unfortunately, these important warning signals are too often ignored because they are perceived as successes rather than near-misses (or near-failures). In this article, we explore the effect of a climate for safety on improving near-miss recognition by observers, hypothesizing that safety climate increases the level of attention that observers pay to the underlying processes that generate an apparently successful outcome. Using a database of anomaly reports for unmanned NASA missions, we show that organizational safety climate and project stakes increase reporting rates of near-misses, both independently and interactively. In follow-up laboratory experiments, we confirm the independence of these effects to improve the likelihood that people differentiate near-miss outcomes from successes. Results suggest organizations can increase the recognition of near-misses with organizational messages that emphasize a positive safety climate.