Trade-offs among factors shaping operators decision-making: the case of aircraft maintenance technicians

The present research deals with aircraft maintenance technicians (AMTs) situated decision-making in a commercial aircraft maintenance department. The aim is twofold: first, to study how AMTs through their situated decisions experience inconsistencies between diverse organizational imperatives and pragmatic constraints and second, to identify persistent factors, dualities and/or trade-offs that affect these decisions. Towards this end, twenty-five cases where AMTs faced ambiguity or dilemmas and took decisions during maintenance work were analysed, after being observed in situ. The analysis followed a bottom-up approach where the decision cases observed were first examined in terms of the contextual factors that influenced their outcome. Such contextual factors did not only include the random events triggering a need for a decision, but also the pragmatic constraints that were taken into account by AMTs after the triggering event in order to choose an action path. An interpretative analysis of the above decision cases towards a more abstract level of description, the study achieved at identifying a set of persistent factors underlying decisions at the sharp edge of a safety critical system. It is argued that such persistent factors and their articulation can be identified in operators’ decision-making in any particular work setting and can form the basis for sound bottom-up metrics for organizational resilience and proactive safety management.