>>>I would suggest that attitude and personality are more likely to,
knowingly
or unknowingly, have and effect through the influence they exert on others
in the organization. <<<
I agree. However the danger in attempting to categorise behaviour into
personality types is effective cultural ostracism. If "rogues" exert a
cultural influence they are also subject to it. The quality of the
organisational safety culture is not in it's ability to find and eliminate
undesirables, it is in the interplay between "desirables" and
"undesirables" and the permeability of the boundary between them. A
characteristic of safe organisational culture is "a distributed attitude of
care and concern" for the outcome of safety-related decisions. Anyone can
exhibit rogue characteristics. Effective CRM must discourage those
behaviours wherever they are in the company, including management. Simply
turning a poor performer into the enemy is counterproductive.
An example: three years ago I did a study for a major train operator on
Signals Passed at Danger (SPaD), the railway equivalent of altitude bust.
We found that in a significant number of cases incidents which should have
been classified as unintentional were actually classified as Disregards.
Drivers with clean records were put on the At Risk register for reasons
primarily related to the structure of the reporting form. But what was
disturbing was the difficulty drivers had in getting off the At Risk
register once they were placed on it, for whatever reason and whatever
their past history. I believe that the At Risk programme actually fostered
precisely the behaviours it was intended to avoid, simply by branding
drivers as problems instead of finding the latent deficiencies in the
system.
I know "rogue" pilots who have completely transformed themselves at a point
when no one believed it possible or worth attempting. We can probably spot
proto-rogues more efficiently than in the past, but CRM must be more than a
pigeonholing exercise if it is to achieve real change in the industry.
Real change starts with each flight crew each morning.
My 2 pence
Rick Heybroek
LOFTwork