How The Simplification of Work Can Degrade Safety: A Gas Company Case Study

Hortense Blazsin (), Franck Guarnieri () and Christophe Martin ()
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Hortense Blazsin: CRC - Centre de recherche sur les Risques et les Crises - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres
Franck Guarnieri: CRC - Centre de recherche sur les Risques et les Crises - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres
Christophe Martin: CRC - Centre de recherche sur les Risques et les Crises - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres

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Abstract: Work is focused on a gas company that wishes to develop a better understanding of its safety culture and identify potential enhancement opportunities. The hypothesis that emerged from an exploratory phase of work suggests that the corporate restructuring initiated four years ago, which has divided the company into distinct business units, has reduced organizational reliability. This issue raises a question faced by most industrial organizations, namely the trade-off between productivity and safety. On the one hand, streamlining activities offers an opportunity to save money, particularly through economies of scale and employee specialization. On the other hand maintaining flexibility generates costs, but provides a defence against silo effects, which are detrimental to safety. This paper describes how the company was restructured and the effects on risk management. The aim is to better understand the effects of the rationalisation on organizational reliability and performance, in order to identify potential solutions that may limit any counter-productive impacts.

Keywords: Resilience; Safety Culture; Division of Activity; Organization; Field operators; Managers; Trade-Offs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-06-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-00839473v2
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Published in 5th International Symposium on Resilience Engineering, Jun 2013, Netherlands

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-00839473

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