Hard or soft? The relationship between power and organisational incident rates

Dr Susanne Bahn is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Innovative Practice, School ofManagement, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. Her doctoral studyfocused on management values and safety culture. She has worked on several socialresearch projects over the past five years and is currently involved in a number ofevaluations of social programmes. Her interests lie in workplace values, middlemanagement change practices, OH&S processes and social justice.Dr Llandis Barratt-Pugh is a Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Change Management andManagement Development in the Centre for Innovative Practice, School ofManagement, Faculty of Business and Law at Edith Cowan University, WesternAustralia. His research focuses on developing understanding about the orchestrationof workplace learning. He is currently President of the Australian VocationalEducation and Training Research Association (AVETRA).Address for correspondence: Dr Susanne Bahn, School of Management, Edith CowanUniversity, 270 Joondalup Drive, Joondalup, WA, 6027, Australia.AbstractThis paper examines the power that managers have to impact on workplace safety andhow in mixed method studies our preconceptions about the hardness and softness ofthe relevant data may be misplaced. The civil construction industry (CCI) in WAprovides the case for this discussion. Workers in this industry are constantly battlingbetween safety compliance and production pressures in an era of economic boom. Theexamination of 3,882 incident reports, upon which this paper’s conclusions are drawn,revealed that these ‘‘hard’’ data may often obscure incidents that occur asorganisations may be pressured into providing reportable incident figures that makethem appear safer than they really are. Torn between the conflicting responsibilities ofensuring safety compliance and simultaneously progressing work, managers maymanipulate safety data and provide conflicting safety signals to their staff when theirwords appear to be contradicted by their actions. This research found that, due todeliberate or careless misrecording of data, the seemingly hard evidence of safety datawas often a rather soft representation of the reality. Conversely, the research foundthat the softer evidence consisting of manager perceptions revealed how hard andinstrumental management voices and actions can be in shaping workplace safetyculture.