Safety listening: conceptualizing and assessing responses to safety voice in organizations

Abstract

Research on organizational accidents and scandals reveals a common contributory cause: individuals failing to hear and address voiced safety concerns. While understanding responses to concerns before avoidable incidents is recognized as a critical gap within the organizational psychology and safety literatures, researchers have generally focused on promoting speaking up about possible hazards (‘safety voice’). Yet, safety voice may be futile if listeners ignore or dismiss legitimate complaints. Accordingly, this thesis establishes the concept of ‘safety listening’ and positions it as safety voice’s counterpart. Through four articles, it conceptualizes safety listening as behavioural responses following safety voice in organizations; measures it unobtrusively as naturalistic behaviour using transcripts of actual flightdeck conversations preceding aviation incidents; and theorizes and empirically investigates its relationships with voice, team situation awareness, and outcome severity. Article 1 is an integrated conceptual review (n = 57 publications), identifying 36 distinct terms/definitions and a prevalence of assessments using self-reports in decontextualized settings. Article 2 is a comparative case study (n = 45 incidents), developing a safety listening taxonomy and positing that responses which engaged with safety voice reduced harm by recovering teams’ situation awareness. Article 3 develops and tests the Ecological Assessment of Responses to Speaking-up (EARS) behavioural marker system, demonstrating its strong interrater reliability in coding safety listening behaviour (n = 150 incidents). Article 4 reports a mixed-methods analysis (n = 412 incidents) using EARS to test the Voice-Listening Model of Situation Awareness, finding that safety listening recovers teams’ situation awareness after breakdowns which in turn reduces incidents’ severity. Together, this thesis argues that safety listening is situated and world-making behaviour, demonstrates how it can be studied naturalistically, and suggests that interventions seeking to improve organizational safety consider listeners’ responses to concerns.