THE ROLE OF LEADERSHIP IN SAFETY PERFORMANCE AND RESULTS
Abstract
Employee injury rates in U.S. land-based operations in the energy industry are 2 to 3 times higher relative to other regions in the world. Although a rich literature exists on drivers of safety performance, no previous studies investigated factors influencing this elevated rate.
Leadership has been identified as a key contributor to safety outcomes and this grounded theory study drew upon the full range leadership model, situational leadership, and leader-member exchange theories for the conceptual framework. Leadership aspects influencing safety performance were investigated through guided interviews of 27 study participants; data analyses included open and axial coding, and constant comparisons identified higher-level categories.
Selective coding integrated categories into the theoretical framework that developed the idealized, transformational leader traits motivating safe behaviors of leading by example, expressing care and concern for employees‟ well-being, celebrating successes, and communicating the importance of safety (other elements included visibility and commitment).
Employee and supervisor participants reported similar views on the idealized leader traits, but low levels of these qualities may be driving elevated injury rates. Identifying these key elements provides the foundation to creating strategies and action plans enabling energy sector companies to prevent employee injuries and fatalities in an industry where tens of thousands of employees are subjected to significant hazards and elevated risks.
Creating safer workplaces for U.S. employees by enhancing leaders‟ skills, building knowledge, and improving behaviors will improve the employees‟ and their families‟ lives by reducing the pain and suffering resulting from injuries and fatalities.
Chapter 1: Introduction to the Study
Introduction
Every day, individuals leave their homes to participate in their chosen professions with the full expectation of returning at the end of the day or shift in the same condition as they left, albeit potentially tired, fulfilled, frustrated, relieved, or exhilarated.
The reality in far too many cases is that they may not return home at all if they are injured or killed on the job. Workplace injuries and deaths are a sobering consequence for employees in the U.S. and all countries of the world. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) annually reports workplace injury rates and identified approximately 4.6 million employees were injured on the job (private and public sectors figures combined) in the United States in 2008 (BLS, 2009).
Sadly, injuries and deaths occurred in many industries considered benign such as teaching school (e.g., Asmussen & Creswell, 1995), and these types of fatalities can be shocking to the public. Injuries and deaths in industries considered dangerous may be less shocking, but no less tragic.
Energy extraction, or oil and gas exploration and production, as it is more commonly known, is considered a dangerous industry (Mearns & Yule, 2009). Companies in the energy industry explore for oil and gas on a global scale through a technically demanding process in developed, developing, and remote geographic areas.
Consequently, workplace requirements expose employees to physically, psychologically, and medically dangerous conditions. Understandably, companies in this industry endeavor to provide safe working conditions to protect employees from potentially dire consequences.
Similar to various governmental agencies (e.g., BLS), energy companies keep specific injury reporting statistics not only to satisfy regulatory requirements, but also as a means of understanding injury causes and for developing preventative solutions.
As a tightly connected global industry, the record-keeping practices result in transparency of injury rates from all energy producing geographic regions primarily aided by key industry associations such as the International Oil and Gas Producers Association (OGP) and the International Drilling Contractors Association (IADC). The annual statistical reports published by these two organizations revealed a startling trend related to regional injury rates.
The U.S. land-based operations of the energy industry have the highest employee injury rate relative to other geographic regions, for example offshore operations in the U.S. (2009 land-based employee rate: 3.11 or 3.11 employees injured per every 100 employees, 2009 offshore operations injury rate: 0.98 or 0.98 employees inured per every 100 employees injury; 2008 land-based rate: 4.11 versus 1.25 offshore operations rate; IADC, 2008, 2009).
Safety practitioners in the energy industry have observed, discussed, and attempted to address this increased injury rate trend for years (pers. obs.). Numerous solutions have been attempted based on good safety practices, and yet the trend of elevated injuries rates in U.S. land operations continues.
Further, based on a review of the relevant literature, no scientific investigations were found that explored this phenomenon. In an anthropological case study of the Norwegian oil industry, Haukelid (2008) recounted the start of drilling activity in this sector as the Texas period, denoted by a culture of numerous accidents and risk taking.
This period in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea lasted from 1966-1980 when a significant rig (Aleksander Kielland) disaster forced the industry to progress to a higher level of safety awareness and activity (Haukelid, 2008).
The global nature of the industry, in many respects, forced most companies to move past this initial period of high risk-taking, so the elevated trend in U.S. land operations remains an enigma not studied by scholars. Even with a global industry, an easy leap to explaining the elevated injury rate is the potential differences in national cultures. In a comprehensive review of numerous aspects of cultural differences in more than 60 countries (i.e., GLOBE research), conducted by House et al.
(2004), clear differences in national cultural characteristics were indentified. However, in a more recent study, Mearns and Yule (2009) reviewed the GLOBE implications for the global oil industry and found that management commitment and the effectiveness of safety measures had a greater role in safety outcomes than culture.
In a previous study of a regional sector of the oil and gas industry, Mearns, Rudmo, Flin, Gordon, and Fleming (2004) studied national culture implications for safety outcomes in the North Sea (United Kingdom; U.K. and Norwegian sectors) and found that the specific rig installation (leader) accounted for greater levels of variability in the results than did national culture.
In a similar effort at North Sea installations, Høivik, Tharaldsen, Baste, and Moen (2009) found that the installation accounted for more of the variability than did the specific company employing the study participants. In short, the leader of the installation had a greater influence on safety outcomes than national culture. National culture may influence the elevated rate of injuries in U.S. land-based operations, but an overriding impact was not previously identified.
The intent of the current research project was to explore this elevated injury trend through a grounded theory methodology to develop an understanding of the influence of leadership in employee injury prevention or lack thereof in U.S. land-based operations. Previous studies conducted in the energy industry focused on safety climate as a predictor of safety performance and safety outcomes or, in other words, the employee injury rate (e.g., Haukelid, 2008; Høivik, Moen, Mearns, & Haukelid, 2009; Mearns & Reader, 2008; Mearns, Whitaker & Flin, 2001.
Studies on safety climate conducted at oil field operations or in other industries identified various factors (e.g., management commitment, employee compliance and participation behavior, supervisor visibility and commitment to safety, and production demands) encompassing the construct of safety climate.
Neal and Griffin (2002), Zohar (1980, 2001, 2008), Zohar and Luria (2005), and numerous others investigated the drivers behind good safety climate ultimately leading to good safety outcomes. As is more fully developed in chapter 2, researchers (Guldenmund, 2000; Mearns & Flin, 1999) frequently cited leadership as a key antecedent of good safety climate.
Safety climate, sometimes inappropriately used interchangeably with safety culture, has been described as the shared perception of policies (goals, organizational level), procedures (tactical, management level), and their implementation (tactical, supervisor level) at specific levels (e.g., Zohar, 1980, 2008). Safety climate is also described as strong or weak (according to the consensus level of employees) or high or low (Zohar & Luria, 2004).
Over 30 years ago, Zohar (1980) determined a relationship between high or good safety climate and good safety outcomes. Many authors (e.g., Cooper, 2000; Mearns et al., 2003; Pousette, Larsson, & Törner, 2008; Zohar, 2001) credited the increased focus on safety culture and climate to the headline grabbing industrial accidents such as the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion in Russia where the investigating commission identified the lack of an appropriate safety culture as the root cause of the accident.
Together with leadership and other antecedents of safety climate and safety performance, numerous productive research threads resulted in increased understanding of factors driving safety outcomes at various organizations (Guldenmund, 2007).
Background of the Study
Expecting to live through the workday is not a thought that even enters the consciousness of most people; employees take it for granted. Worrying about being injured is a far more common daily concern for employees in the energy extraction industry. According to the 2009 IADC statistical report (IADC, 2009), an individual working in U.S. land-based operations was more than 3 times as likely to be injured at work than a counterpart working offshore in the Gulf of Mexico and twice as likely to be injured than a colleague in Africa.
If the employee works for a service company (an organization that provides various technical services to the energy company), he or she likely has the opportunity to work in all of these regions and in other geographies as well. Service companies presented a good model to investigate the phenomenon of increased injury rates in the U.S. as the nature of their business model entails service company employees conducting most of the hazardous work at a drilling or production operations exposing them to a variety of safety climates while working for different clients.
A U.S. land-based service company that has been in existence for over 100 years, has a broad array of operating locations, and has employees working in land-based drilling operations in the U.S. was selected for this study. This service company has various operations including drilling and evaluation programs, well completions, and production enhancing services.
The products and services include drill bits, directional drilling and evaluation tools, well completion products, well logging services, production chemicals, and drilling fluids. The company typically manufactures products at owned facilities and further assembles or maintains equipment at smaller locations around the world. The company employs skilled trade people, machinists, basic labor, and highly educated professionals including research scientists and engineers.
While service companies employ a host of professionals ranging from accountants to physicists, the conditions for employees involved in providing direct field services to oil and gas companies can pose the greatest challenges for safety.
Employees involved in field operations (i.e., drilling activities) are typically assigned to small bases around the country but often move from job (i.e., drilling site) to job without spending any time back at the home base. Job duties for employees include directional drilling and assessment, wireline operations, fluids and chemicals services, and other technical services such as installation of electrical pumps and down-hole equipment.
Depending upon the specific job category, the employees can be at the rig site from several days to as long as a month. During drilling operations, fatigue easily can become a factor in injury causation, as 24-hour operations are common.
On the production side, single employees can visit numerous well sites applying chemicals or maintaining equipment. In certain locations, employees are able to return home at the end of their shifts, but working for multiple days is accepted practice. These employees face safety challenges on a daily basis and efforts to improve the understanding of safety performance and safety outcomes will serve this population with lifestyle or life critical benefits.
The service company involved in this research effort and most service and energy industry companies are keenly aware of the potentially hazardous conditions employees are exposed to and have developed many engineering improvements to eliminate or minimize the risks.
Further, extensive training programs are in place to provide employees the knowledge and skills to recognize inherent job hazards and protect themselves from the existing risks. In the U.S., the Department of Labor through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration mandates a duty of care for an employer that includes engineering, training, and protective equipment requirements.
Various trade associations such as the American Petroleum Institute, the IADC, the Petroleum Equipment Suppliers Association, the OGP, and professional societies such as the Society of Petroleum Engineers hold safety as a key focal point for their membership.
Notwithstanding the significant effort on the part of the companies, the associations, and the government and despite improvements over the years, the U.S. industry has not been successful in eliminating workplace injuries nor in reducing them to levels lower than other regions of the world or in offshore environments.
The energy industry has an important role in the U.S. economy and workplace injuries are a significant concern for employees and society. Companies that occupy the service role for the operating companies (i.e., oil and gas companies) are typically involved in the most hazardous aspects of the business. Consequently, a large U.S. service company was a good candidate to investigate the factors contributing to an elevated injury rate.
Statement of the Problem
The energy industry explores for oil and gas on a global scale, exposing employees to hazardous situations that can lead to injuries and sometimes death. Injury records kept by companies and trade associations have revealed a trend of an elevated injury rate in land-based operations in the U.S. relative to other geographic regions and even to offshore operations in the U.S. (e.g., Gulf of Mexico).
There is a rich and varied literature investigating safety performance and safety outcomes in the energy industry (e.g., Haukelid, 2008; Mearns & Reader, 2008; Naevestad, 2008) and in other industries (e.g., Neal & Griffin, 2004; Zohar, 2008) specifically on the role of safety climate and the various antecedents (e.g., supervisor leadership style and visibilty, priority placed on safety over production, communication between organizational levels, employee involvement in safety activities, policies, and procedures) influencing safety climate and outcomes.
The problem, however, is that no studies have focused on the elevated rate in U.S. land-based operations of the energy industry or on the role of leadership influencing these elevated rates. The lack of scholarly studies exploring the underlying factors leading to the elevated injury trend for U.S. land-based energy industry employees is an especially important gap in the body of knowledge as thousands of individuals are potentially subjected to injuries in this workplace.
Nature of the Study
The current study used a qualitative approach to explore the role of leadership in influencing the trend of elevated injury rates for employees working in the U.S. land-based operations at an oil field service company. Qualitative research was appropriate since the subject was not previously researched, the complexity of the topic did not lend
itself to experimentation, and no definitive theories had been developed for testing (Corbin & Strauss, 2008; Creswell, 2007). Qualitative research also enabled a better understanding of the individuals and issues under study and was relevant to nonacademic audiences such as the energy industry for the current study (Corbin & Strauss, 2008.
A grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) approach was used to study the current research question allowing me to develop knowledge inductively using the data obtained from the employees who are faced with living this situation of potential injury on a daily basis (Creswell, 2007; Leedy & Ormrod, 2009).
Grounded theory is a method of developing theory from data systematically obtained from participants (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Using grounded theory method allowed me to identify specific social processes influencing the safety performance of employees in U.S. land-based operations of the service company.
Specific details of the study methodology, following the grounded theory approach are presented in chapter 3. As a brief overview, data for the study were collected from study participants through structured interviews, both in person and via teleconference.
Open-ended questions, focused around themes identified in the literature, guided the discussion. An interview guide was developed and used to provide an initial structure to the interview process. Interview narratives were used as the raw data to code, categorize, constantly compare, and to identify and abstract themes leading to the development of a theoretical framework.
Additional data included reflexive memos to identify and make personal impressions transparent, memos and field notes, and models providing a visual depiction of the themes.
Data collection and analysis was an iterative process and drove the ultimate direction of the study. As a measure of study verification, triangulation was used by allowing participants to review categories, themes, and the proposed framework to assess whether a faithful representation of their lived experiences resulted. Professional peers also provided assessments of the generated theories identifying their resonance for logic, practicality, and congruence to their professional experiences.
I targeted a study population consisting of a minimun of 10 employees and 10 first-line supervisors working in the field (generally land-based rig sites or repair and maintence facilities) in the U.S. for an oil field service company. Invitations to potential study participants yielded a total of 27 individuals (15 employee participants and 12 supervisor participants).
These participants were identified as those assigned to U.S. land-based operations for at least 8 months of the past year. Company records were used to identify at least 100 individuals meeting these criteria and invitation letters were sent requesting their voluntary participation in the study consisting of a 1 hour interview near their base of operation or via telephone.
While the study population resided within the same company as the researcher, none of the potential participants was in the same department, structural organization, or work site location. A potential population size of approximately 5000 employees exists and a minimum sample of 20 volunteers (employees and supervisors unmatched) was expected to be identified.
While the interview data were kept confidential and results did not identify particular individuals, the nature of the study did not portend high-risk potential for participants. Energy industry employees frequently discuss safety topics such as those included in the proposed research interviews. Attempting to conduct this study in an external company would have led to difficulties in overcoming competitor business confidentiality.
Research Questions
This grounded theory study was guided and framed by the following research questions:
What aspects of leadership style do employees and supervisors describe as important while discussing safety performance? Are the views of employees and supervisors different? How do various leader actions (e.g., communication, visibility and visioning, care for employees, commitment to safety) manifest in the land-based operations of an energy service company?
Purpose of the Study
A comprehensive review of the safety literature indicated employee safety to be a topic of much interest and importance to scholars, practitioners, business leaders, government agencies, and nongovernmental organizations. Many scholars focused on industries considered highly hazardous as a means to exploring cause and effects of employee injuries and as a means to developing interventions.
Further, practitioners in the field spend entire careers dedicated to preventing employee injuries and searching for programs accepted by employees and management and achieving the goal of reducing injuries. The purpose of this study was to explore the role of leadership influencing a persistent trend in the energy industry related to an elevated injury rate among U.S. land-based employees relative to peers in U.S. offshore operations and other regions.
The goal of the research was to uncover the key drivers of this trend based upon the knowledge of factors (e.g., leadership style, employee motivation, levels of trust) shown to be important in fostering good safety performance and safety outcomes in previous investigations. Establishing the preliminary position of knowledge for this important problem was the first step in identifying potential solutions that could be empirically tested in future studies.
Conceptual Framework
This study explored leadership factors potentially influencing the increased injury rates of employees working for an energy service company in the U.S. relative to other geographic work sites. The investigation drew upon leadership theories primarily focused on the full range leadership model (Bass & Riggio, 2006), situational leadership theory (Hersey, Blanchard, & Johnson, 2008), and leader-member exchange (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995; Northouse, 2007) theory.
The focus on leadership as a potential driving factor for this elevated injury rate phenomenon was appropriate for several reasons. In a basic sense, the call for effective leadership is decades old (Bass, 1990) and continues to the present. Further, leadership has been found by various scholars (e.g., Luria, 2008; Mullen & Kelloway, 2009; Zohar, 2003) to be directly and indirectly related to safety performance and safety outcomes.
Neal and Griffin (2004) reviewed safety climate studies looking at both individual and organizational level antecedents and their results suggested the role of leadership was complex and needed improved understanding to enable reduction of employee injuries.
Consequently, a number of authors have called for qualitative studies to improve the understanding of leadership influence and the importance of other factors in directing safety performance and ultimately resulting in good safety outcomes (Antonsen, 2009a, 2009b; Guldenmund, 2007; Zohar, 2001). Given the amount of time individuals spend at work, supervisors are an overwhelming influence on employees and logically affect their efforts.
The indirect effects of leadership on safety performance were also noted through its role of as an antecedent of safety climate, a construct that generally measures the perceptions of employees to safety policies and procedures, their implementation and the relative to the priority given to safety over production or other business goals (Zohar, 2008; Zohar & Luria, 2005).
The safety climate literature is rich but varied in focus and often concerned with simply measuring the current climate of the organization (Guldenmund, 2007). In the current investigation, I searched for key aspects of safety climate that were or could be important drivers for safety within U.S. land-based operations of the service company.
Definitions
The following terms of art or professional jargon are used throughout the chapters and are defined in this section to provide operational clarity.
Days away from work case or lost time rate: a mathematical summation of all lost time injuries suffered by relevant employees divided by the total number of hours worked by the relevant employees multiplied by 200,000 to standardize the rate to one lost time injury per 100 employees.
Employee voice: providing voluntary information to management in order to improve conditions at the workplace (Detert & Burris, 2007).
First aid injury: a minor injury that does not require medical treatment or prescription medication (e.g., a minor cut treated with over the counter antiseptics and band-aids). These types of injuries were termed micro-accidents by Zohar (2000).
Incident management system: pseudonym given to describe the company software system to capture, record and trend incident and near miss information.
Hand: an oil field slang term for employee.
Incident: an unplanned and undesired event that results in a loss or could have resulted in a loss under slightly different circumstances.
Injury rate: a general metric for assessing the frequency of occupational injuries by calculating the number of specific types of workplace injuries per the number of work hours and normalized to injuries per 100 employees to allow comparisons between different employee population sizes.
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration descriptions of injuries and rates are used in this study and generally within the energy industry making them a good method for comparing companies and results in different geographies. The keystone terms encompassing injury rate are total recordable injury rate, restricted duty case rate, and days away from work case rate.
Loss: defined as the unnecessary waste of resources, including people (e.g., through fatality, injury, illness), plant/equipment (e.g., through damage, repairs, replacement), process (e.g., through interruption), amenity (e.g., through environmental pollution), or reputation (e.g., through adverse publicity).
Personal protective equipment (PPE): equipment worn by employees to protect against workplace hazards. Examples include safety glasses, steel-toed shoes, gloves, etc.
Recordable injury: a recordable injury is a work-related episode that requires the employee to receive medical treatment (e.g., stitches to a cut) beyond first aid, but allows the employee to return to work once treatment is administered.
Safety climate: a snapshot measurement of employees‟ perceptions about the status and importance of safety within an organization (e.g., the policies, procedures, and practices), and their attitudes and beliefs related to behaving and acting safely or taking risks (Griffin & Neal, 2000; Mearns & Flin, 1999). Safety climate is a manifestation of the safety culture of the organization (Mearns, Whitaker, & Flin, 2001). Measurements are typically reflective of a specified group, but composed of aggregated individual assessments.
Safety climate level: the aggregated group members‟ rating of the safety climate perception items (Zohar, 2001, 2008; Zohar & Tenne-Gazit, 2008).
Safety climate strength: the consensus of the individual safety climate perceptions measured for the group (Zohar, 2001, 2008; Zohar & Tenne-Gazit, 2008).
Safety culture: describes the shared perceptions and attitudes related to the importance of safety (Cooper, 2000; Guldenmund, 2000). Culture was also described by Glendon & Stanton (2000) to have depth, at the surface are the visible manifestations (e.g., statements, meetings, PPE use), a middle layer includes the espoused values and the deeper layer of the basic assumptions regarding the nature and reality of truth, time, space, human nature, activity, and relationship. Safety compliance: the core or required safety activities that must be accomplished to maintain system safety (Griffin & Neal, 2000).
Safety outcomes: a measure of an organization‟s success in preventing injuries. The measure typically used is an injury or incident (includes occupational illnesses) rate (Burke, Chan-Serafin, Salvador, Smith, & Sarpy, 2008) Safety participation: engaging in voluntary activities related to improving system safety (Griffin & Neal, 2000).
Safety performance: defined as the level of safety compliance and safety participation by Clarke (2006), determined by employees‟ knowledge levels, skill, and motivation (Griffin & Neal, 2000). However, safety practitioners and other researchers (e.g., Mearns & Reader, 2008) tend to use the term as a level of occupational injuries (which type of injuries is rarely specified) denoting good (low levels of injuries) or poor (high levels of injuries) performance.
In this study, safety outcome was used as the term describing injury occurrence performance. Safety specific transformational leadership: behaviors exhibited by leaders that promote safety. For example, concern for safety and well-being of employees (individualized behavior), communicating a vision of workplace safety (idealized influence), challenging employees to achieve exceptional safety performance (inspirational motivation), and encouraging employees to solve safety problems (intellectual stimulation; Barling, Loughlin, & Kelloway, 2002; Mullen & Kelloway, 2009).
Significant near miss event: an incident not resulting in injury, death, or property or environmental damage, but could have resulted in these foreseeable serious consequences given slightly different circumstances.
Total recordable injury rate (TRIR): TRIR is a mathematical summations of all medical treatment beyond first aid cases, restricted duty cases, and days away from work cases for relevant employees, dividing this figure by the number of hours worked by the relevant employees and multiplying by 200,000 to standardize the rate to one recordable injury per 100 employees.
Training system: a pseudonym used to describe the company software system that contains training modules and a recordkeeping system of attendance.
Assumptions
The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of leadership on elevated employee occupational injury rate trend. Specifically, in U.S. land-based operations, employee injury rates are 3 times higher than comparable situations in U.S. offshore operations and Canadian land-based operations (IADC, 2009).
The reason(s) for this elevated rate were assumed to be complex and had not been subjected to previous academic research. In this exploratory investigation of the problem, I assumed individuals experiencing the work situations and facing hazardous conditions daily were well placed to provide data leading to the generation of theories.
Further, I assumed those individuals volunteering to participate in this study were candid, forthcoming with their responses to the interview questions, and willing to review material to assess developed theories. I also assumed the participants were honest in their replies and shared a goal of identifying pertinent data necessary to develop substantive theories using the grounded theory method. Each participant was encouraged to be candid and assured confidentiality.
Related to the knowledge of the participants, I assumed study volunteers to had a basic understanding of safety and the expectations of the company related to employees actions, but the participants were not assumed experts in the field of safety or leadership. I also assumed that each participant had a relationship with a supervisor within the company and communicated with this supervisor with some level of frequency.
Scope Delimitations
This investigation included boundaries that limited the scope and generalizability of the results. The overriding boundary included the selection of a single U.S. based service company with a large employee base in the U.S., but also with employees working in 90 countries. The study took place during 2010 and only included participants working within relevant states (i.e., oil and gas producing) for at least 8 months of the last year. I attempted to select volunteers with longer work tenures in U.S. land-based operations.
I targeted the study sample to include a minimum of 20 participants, but concluded the study with 27 participants based on the number of individuals responding to the study invitations. While the proposed methodology is described in chapter 3, a grounded theory study required me to remain open to unexpected turns in the process and allow the emergent data to potentially drive the effort in unplanned directions.
The focus of the study was delimited to factors that influenced the elevated injury in the land-based operations of the energy service company. Factors primarily included leadership, management commitment, safety versus production priority, employee safety performance and motivation, participation and compliance, and communication as described by the participants.
This study did not address the influence of personality characteristics on the observed injury rate trend. Further, the study did not address the role of society, community, or regulatory factors influencing injury trends. Nevertheless, grounded theory methodology did not lend itself to identifying all the important factors before the research began and additional factors were included as the participants introduced them.
Limitations
I endeavored to conduct a scholarly investigation with integrity and high standards; however, as with all social research, the study has limitations. First, since I am a practitioner in the health, safety, and environmental (HS&E) field, a potential for bias existed which could have influenced the interpretations of the findings.
This potential bias extended to strong indications in the research literature regarding the importance of leadership in driving safety performance and safety outcomes. Contrary to the direction provided by Glaser and Strauss (1967), in which these scholars encourage researchers not to delve to deeply into the literature prior to beginning the research project, the nature of the dissertation process is to become very knowledgeable of the existing literature.
To address the limitation of potential bias, several mechanisms such as data triangulation, extensive time in the field, and participant and peer reviews were used. Additionally, during the research phase, memoing was used to surface potential biases and make transparent the mental dialogue with the collected data.
Participant checking was used to determine accuracy of the identified themes. A pool of professional colleagues was also accessed to provide another check of the developing framework for real-world applicability and sensemaking.
Participant selection in a qualitative study is not intended to follow criteria for randomness; however, the initial candidate pool was selected based on general criteria without regard to participant knowledge of good safety performance characteristics.
Time in the field was limited, and some participants were not able to fully explain their situation or in some cases be cognizant of the nuances related to safety requirements. I explained the intent of the project to each participant and balanced the amount of time available in the field with the need to saturate categories and look for negative cases.
Significance of Study
This study is significant because it first served to identify an important and long-standing gap in the literature, namely the lack of scholarly investigations into the cause of the elevated trend of employee injuries in the U.S. land-based operations of the energy industry versus other regions.
Occupational injuries are a significant concern for businesses, governments, nongovernmental organizations, and most especially employees. Safety performance and safety outcomes, studied within various industries, was found to be influenced by a complex variety of factors such as supervisor leadership style and visibility, priority placed on safety over production, the level of communication between supervisors and employees, etc.
This grounded theory study explored the role of leadership in influencing the differential (higher) injury rates of employees working in land-based operations of an energy services company in the U.S. Scholars have reported leadership to be one of the key attributes driving safety performance in previous studies and this construct served as a good starting point for this investigation (e.g., Luria, 2008; Mullen & Kelloway, 2009; Zohar & Luria, 2003).
Answering the research question through data obtained from employees living the experience led to the potential factors, leadership driven and otherwise, preventing a safer work environment for employees. The effort contributed to positive social change in providing employees a voice in the situation and elucidating good and poor existing practices. This effort led to testable theories enabling further research to generate an important body of knowledge and ideas for practitioners to use in reducing injuries and fatalities in this industry.
Summary
This chapter introduced the study of the influence of leadership on the elevated injury rates in U.S. land-based operations of an energy industry service company. A brief overview of the background and the problem statement led to the statement of the research questions. The conceptual framework of the investigation centered on theories of leadership as numerous previous studies indicated the strong influence of leadership on safety performance and safety outcomes.
Significantly, none of these studies addressed the trend observed in the energy industry injury rates in U.S. land-based operations. As this investigation was an initial look at this problem, a qualitative (grounded theory method) study was used to explore the research questions.
The following chapter provides a review of the literature focusing on applicable aspects of leadership, safety climate, and culture studies, and the antecedents of safety performance and safety outcomes. Chapter 3 presents the methodology and procedures used in this investigation, highlighting the grounded theory approach, the interview questions, and participant selection.
The succeeding chapter presents the results of the investigation and the framework developed from the participant information. Chapter 5 includes a synthesis of the literature review and the results of the current study to identify key themes in understanding and answering the research questions. Based upon the identified theories, recommendations for future study and directions for practitioners to take in working to test identified theories or begin to put in place actions that will serve to minimize the employee injury rates in land-based operations are provided that chapter.
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