GB890 Unit 10 Background Chapter Draft Example

One Chapter From Nine Pieces: A Unit 10 Background Chapter Draft for a Supervisor Safety Project

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GB890: Doctoral Project I: Problem Statement and Background Research

Unit 10 Background Chapter Draft

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[Date]

Corliss Baking Company, its plants and every figure are composite and illustrative; the studies and guidance cited are real.

Section 1: Foundation of the Study

Background of the Problem

Corliss Baking Company, a wholesale bakery group, operates five plants. Over the most recent three years its plants recorded 118 injuries serious enough to enter their OSHA logs, and the experience modification rate on its workers' compensation policy rose from 0.91 to 1.14. Those injuries were not spread evenly. Fifty-three percent involved associates in their first ninety days on the line, and the three plants whose rates were worst, ranging from about 4.2 to 5.4 cases per 100 full-time workers, were those with the largest shares of staffing agency temporaries.

The company's first response, repeating safety orientation for every associate, assumed the problem was missing knowledge. Orientation completion was already near universal. Observation of twenty-four shift-start meetings found that supervisors raised safety beyond a scripted routine in only five, and the three highest-rate plants together submitted just nine near-miss reports in a year. The pattern points to what happens on the line after orientation rather than to orientation itself.

Problem Statement

The general business problem is that injuries in food manufacturing concentrate among newly placed workers, many of them agency temporaries, whose host-employer supervisors may not communicate about safety in ways that offset the risk of being new. The specific business problem is that Corliss's leadership lacks evidence on whether feedback to shift supervisors about their safety conversations, produced by the company's own safety staff, alters how crews with heavy turnover perceive their supervisor's safety priorities and how often they report near misses.

Purpose Statement

This quasi-experimental project will examine, over twelve weeks, whether supervisors at two Corliss plants who receive a weekly account of their safety conversations lead crews whose safety climate and near-miss reporting change relative to crews at two matched plants without the feedback.

Nature of the Project

A quasi-experimental design with matched comparison plants was chosen because the question concerns effect, plants rather than individuals must be assigned to avoid spread between conditions, and randomization across only four plants would not balance their differences. A qualitative design was considered and rejected because it could describe supervisors' communication but not whether feedback changes it.

Conceptual Framework

The framework links six constructs. Supervisor safety communication, meaning how often safety comes up when a supervisor talks with the crew outside meetings, is expected to shape group safety climate, a crew's shared sense of the priority its supervisor gives safety against speed (Zohar, 2000; Zohar & Luria, 2005). Climate is expected to shape two forms of safety performance, compliance and participation, as Griffin and Neal (2000) distinguished them, with near-miss reporting treated as participation. Newcomer and agency status are treated as moderators of the link between communication and climate. A dashed link to recordable injuries marks a relationship the theory includes and the project cannot test in twelve weeks.

Review of the Literature

The review is organized around three claims. The search that produced it, run across four databases and a behavior analysis journal in two vocabularies, is documented in Appendix A, and the appraisal of the forty-one resulting sources in Appendix B.

Supervisors Shape a Crew's Sense of Safety

Group-level climate research shows that crews in the same company form different perceptions of their supervisors' safety priorities and that those perceptions predict minor injuries (Zohar, 2000). Intervention studies show that changing supervisors' everyday safety talk can change climate and behavior (Zohar, 2002) and that the effect extends beyond manufacturing (Kines et al., 2010). Pooling studies from many industries, one meta-analysis ranks climate high among workplace conditions that forecast safety performance (Christian et al., 2009).

Newcomers Carry Higher Risk

Workers in their first month on a job face several times the risk of lost-time injury that workers with a year's tenure face (Breslin & Smith, 2006). Temporary agency workers combine newness with divided employment, and federal guidance holds host employers responsible for their training and protection (Occupational Safety and Health Administration & National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 2014).

Tested Interventions Have Used Stable Crews

Both the leadership studies and the behavioral studies, including a 1978 bakery study that observed and fed back safe performance in two departments (Komaki et al., 1978), were conducted with groups whose membership stayed largely the same. None examined whether supervisory or feedback interventions work when crews turn over rapidly.

The mechanism is established and the risk is established; what remains untested is whether the mechanism holds where the risk is greatest.

The Closest Study

Zohar (2002) tested an intervention closer to this project than any other: supervisors received feedback based on their workers' accounts of how often safety entered daily exchanges, and minor injuries fell. Four of this project's elements were tested there. The project's contribution lies in three that were not: crews with high churn, a large share of agency workers and feedback produced internally by the company's own safety staff rather than by researchers.

Reconciling Figures Across Units

Three figures that drifted between earlier units have been reconciled. The three-year case total is 118, with 63 among newcomers, as in the Unit 2 memo. The search yield is seventeen studies from the original search plus six from the follow-up, as in Units 3 and 6. And the study period is twelve weeks, as in the purpose statement, replacing an earlier reference to a full season.

Limits of the Background

The background rests on one company's records and on a literature dominated by studies in stable crews. The injury figures come from five plants over three years, which reveals a pattern yet cannot exclude plant-specific causes such as equipment. The observation of shift starts covered twenty-four meetings and may have been influenced by the observer's presence. And the gap, though narrowed after the seminar, rests on what the searches found; a study in a high-turnover plant published outside the databases searched would narrow it further. Section 2 describes how the project's design addresses the first two limits.

Transition

Section 1 has set out the problem, purpose, design rationale, framework and literature. Section 2 will describe the project's method: the four plants and how they were matched, the feedback procedure, the measures of climate and near-miss reporting, data collection and analysis, and the ethical protections required when the person running the study is the company's own safety manager.

References

Breslin, F. C., & Smith, P. (2006). Trial by fire: A multivariate examination of the relation between job tenure and work injuries. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 63(1), 27-32. https://doi.org/10.1136/oem.2005.021006

Christian, M. S., Bradley, J. C., Wallace, J. C., & Burke, M. J. (2009). Workplace safety: A meta-analysis of the roles of person and situation factors. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(5), 1103-1127. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016172

Griffin, M. A., & Neal, A. (2000). Perceptions of safety at work: A framework for linking safety climate to safety performance, knowledge, and motivation. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 5(3), 347-358. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.5.3.347

Kines, P., Andersen, L. P. S., Spangenberg, S., Mikkelsen, K. L., Dyreborg, J., & Zohar, D. (2010). Improving construction site safety through leader-based verbal safety communication. Journal of Safety Research, 41(5), 399-406. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2010.06.005

Komaki, J., Barwick, K. D., & Scott, L. R. (1978). A behavioral approach to occupational safety: Pinpointing and reinforcing safe performance in a food manufacturing plant. Journal of Applied Psychology, 63(4), 434-445. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.63.4.434

Occupational Safety and Health Administration & National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. (2014). Recommended practices: Protecting temporary workers (DHHS [NIOSH] Publication No. 2014-139). U.S. Department of Labor.

Zohar, D. (2000). A group-level model of safety climate: Testing the effect of group climate on microaccidents in manufacturing jobs. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85(4), 587-596. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.85.4.587

Zohar, D. (2002). Modifying supervisory practices to improve subunit safety: A leadership-based intervention model. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(1), 156-163. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.87.1.156

Zohar, D., & Luria, G. (2005). A multilevel model of safety climate: Cross-level relationships between organization and group-level climates. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(4), 616-628. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.90.4.616