GB890 Unit 6 Seminar Reflection Example

The Bakery Study I Missed: A Unit 6 Seminar Reflection on Vocabulary and Gaps

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GB890: Doctoral Project I: Problem Statement and Background Research

Unit 6 Seminar Reflection

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The classmate and Corliss Baking Company are composite; the counts from the follow-up search are illustrative, and the studies discussed are real.

What I Claimed and What I Heard

When the seminar turned to our gap statements, I said, with some pride, that no published study had tested supervisory safety feedback in a bakery or any food plant. My Unit 3 search had found seventeen studies of supervisors and safety in production settings, none in food. A classmate who works as a behavior analyst in a packaging company asked whether I had searched for Komaki. I had not heard the name.

She explained that Komaki et al. (1978) had studied safety in two departments of a wholesale bakery, defining safe practices specific to each department, training employees on them, observing performance and posting feedback on how often the practices were followed. Safe performance rose substantially in both departments during the feedback phases and fell back when feedback was withdrawn. Behavior analysts, she said, have published many similar studies in plants since, under terms like observation and feedback, pinpointing and behavior-based safety. None of those terms are about leadership, which is why my search, built around supervisors and safety leadership, had not found them.

Back to the Databases

The next day I reran the search. I added a fifth source, a hand search of the principal behavior analysis journal for organizational settings, and two terms, observation and performance feedback, to all four databases. The new search returned six studies in food and packaging plants that met my inclusion rules apart from the supervisory requirement. In five of the six, the feedback was delivered by researchers or by trained observers, not by supervisors. In one, supervisors delivered it after training.

What Survived

My original gap, no study in a bakery, did not survive. A bakery study existed, almost fifty years old, and it was one of the founding studies of an entire approach to workplace safety. I had to concede that the setting was not new.

But reading the six studies carefully, I found that something did survive. None reported crews with a large share of agency temporaries or high turnover during the study. In Komaki's bakery, the same employees were observed across baseline, intervention and reversal phases, which is what the design required: a reversal design depends on following the same people. The behavioral studies, like the leadership studies, tested their interventions on stable groups.

The bakery had been studied; what had not been studied was a bakery line where a third of the crew is new every two months.

What also survived, though in a weaker form, was the question of delivery. In most behavior-based studies, the feedback came from outside the supervisory chain. Zohar (2002), working from the leadership tradition, had supervisors change their own behavior, but with researchers supplying the feedback. A design in which the company's own safety staff produce feedback and supervisors act on it falls between the two traditions.

What I Believe Now

I now believe the Corliss gap concerns a kind of crew, not a kind of plant. The setting matters only because food plants with seasonal demand use agency labor heavily, which produces the churn that the published interventions avoided, and federal guidance makes host employers answerable for those workers' safety (Occupational Safety and Health Administration & National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, 2014). That is a narrower gap than the one I claimed, but it is more defensible and more useful, because it names the condition under which existing findings might fail.

I also believe my search method had a blind spot that a single conversation exposed. Two research traditions studying the same practice can use entirely different words for it, and a search built in one vocabulary will miss the other. I have added a line to my search documentation describing the behavioral vocabulary and the reason for adding it.

The exchange also changed how I will write about the gap. I had been prepared to tell my committee that the Corliss project was the first of its kind. A committee member who knew the behavioral literature would have found the 1978 bakery study in minutes, and my credibility on everything else would have suffered. Stating a narrow gap that I can defend is better than stating a broad one that a single citation can overturn.

The Restated Gap

The restated gap reads: published supervisory and behavior-based safety interventions in production settings, including food plants, have been tested in stable crews; whether supervisor-delivered safety feedback changes group climate and near-miss reporting in crews with high turnover and a large share of agency temporaries has not been examined.

References

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. (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