Identification of Organizational Factors Affecting the Safety of Operations: Foundation for Extending Human Reliability Analysis Methods

Organizational factors (OFs) have been identified as a major root cause of accumulated errors and questionable decisions made by personnel and management in different safety-sensitive industries. They have long been viewed by the probabilistic risk assessment community as important contributors to operational safety. Yet, the ambition to quantify OFs remains one of their “grand challenges.” Such a gap also exists in Human Reliability Analysis (HRA). Current HRA methodologies incorporate OFs as performance influencing factors (PIFs), such as training adequacy. However, current OFs definitions present inconsistency and cause overlaps among PIFs. Moreover, the mechanism on how OFs may affect human errors needs further exploration. Therefore, here, our objective is twofold: developing a comprehensive list of OFs affecting operational safety, through an exhaustive literature review, and categorizing those OFs and determining the categories that show the highest influence in the reviewed literature. This will be a foundation to incorporate OFs into HRA.