Safety Management Tasks at Different Management Levels
Top management’s strategic commitment to occupational health and safety (OHS) is crucial, but the middle and frontline managers play an important role in OHS management at the tactical and operational levels. The managers’ commitment can be supported by d
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Abstract Top management’s strategic commitment to occupational health and safety (OHS) is crucial, but the middle and frontline managers play an important role in OHS management at the tactical and operational levels. The managers’ commitment can be supported by defining their OHS responsibilities and tasks. However, practical examples of their tasks are not widely discussed. This qualitative study aims to identify the OHS management tasks at different organizational levels based on empirical findings from Finnish industrial organizations. Top management’s OHS tasks focus on value judgements, goal setting, providing support, and visibly demonstrating their commitment to OHS. Middle managers develop uniform OHS procedures across the organization, and provide guidance to the frontline managers. Frontline managers monitor the daily work and identify the safety development needs for decision making. The emerged OHS tasks mostly involved technical issues, while human factor aspects were less emphasized, although they have been actively studied for some time.
Keywords Human factors Safety management Occupational health and safety Top management Middle management Frontline management
1 Introduction The management function is typically divided into three levels [1]. Top management is responsible for identifying and establishing overall objectives and strategies in relation to the organization’s environment. Middle management is responsible S. Tappura (&) J. Kivistö-Rahnasto Department of Industrial Management, Center for Safety Management and Engineering, Tampere University of Technology, P.O. Box 541, 33101 Tampere, Finland e-mail: sari.tappura@tut.fi A.-M. Teperi Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, Safety Solutions, Töölöntullinkatu 8, 00250 Helsinki, Finland © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2017 J.I. Kantola et al. (eds.), Advances in Human Factors, Business Management, Training and Education, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 498, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-42070-7_104
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for organizing and managing activities for the implementation of these objectives and strategies. Frontline management coordinates and supervises the actual work. In this study, management is studied from the perspective of a manager’s formal position in an organization. The position provides the manager with the resources to lead, as well as the authority and positional control over his/her subordinates [2]. Based on their formal authority, managers represent their employer in relation to occupational health and safety (OHS) legislation [3]. Nevertheless, managerial authority is seldom a sufficient basis for gaining the subordinates’ commitment to safety, since success as a manager also involves leadership [1, 4], and an understanding of human factors (HF) to improve safety [5]. Thus, striking a balance among all these work roles and demands is essential. The importance of managing and order increases when an organization becomes larger, while the importance of leadership, flexib
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