Management of change in the nuclear industry. Evidence from maintenance reorganizations : MainCulture Final Report

The nuclear industry and especially the maintenance activities havebeen under various restructuring initiatives in addition to continuousincremental change due to e.g. new technologies, ageing plants,deregulation and the change of generation. These changes have beenexperienced as causing stress and uncertainty among the workers.Also, changes have lead to e.g. lowered sense of control, goalunclarity and lowered sense of personal responsibility over one’swork. Organizational changes clearly are issues that have potentialeffects on safety. Both positive and negative cases on safety effectsof organizational changes exist, and various accidents have beenpinpointed to organizational changes in the company. In this reportthe challenges of management of change at nuclear power plants areconsidered mainly from organizational culture -perspective. Thecultural perspective taken in this paper strives to combine technicalapproaches to human resources approaches. The report focuses onevidence gathered from studies made at Nordic NPP maintenanceunits, but the results and models depicted in the report are of generalrelevance in the nuclear industry. The report is based on four casestudies of reorganizing in NPP maintenance units and on a literaturereview of change management at various other safety criticalorganizations. The report presents a framework for consideringorganizational changes and their safety consequences.

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