
David C. TappinMassey University · School of Management, Albany Campus, Auckland
David C. Tappin
PhD, MSc, Dip Pty, CNZHFE
About
74
Publications
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Introduction
I am a Professor at Massey University and co-director of the Healthy Work Group. I have a background in industry-based research & consultancy in NZ. My research interests are the nature and quality of work and its effects on health, sustainability and performance. Research outputs & activities are on my Massey page or Google Scholar.
Additional affiliations
June 2010 - March 2011
Self-employed
Position
- Lecturer
October 1993 - December 2000
South Pacific Ergonomics Ltd
Position
- Ergonomist and co-director
Description
- Consultancy and industry-based research.
Publications
Publications (74)
This article illustrates how vignettes were utilised as prompts in a semi-structured interview study of multiple job holders during the Covid-19 pandemic, to overcome challenges created by the latent nature of the topic under investigation and the atypical situation created by the pandemic. Our illustrative qualitative study sought to understand ho...
Effectively addressing overwork culture in business remains a challenge, despite growing concerns about its negative impacts on employee wellbeing and productivity. This paper investigates corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives and stake-holder management promoted by large Japanese companies to address overwork culture. Based on intervie...
This conceptual paper advocates for a Strategy as Practice (SAP) lens, which prioritises people and context, in future Human Resource Management (HRM) research related to strategy. The paper first provides a summary of what SAP intrinsically brings to the table and how it could provide an additive lens to better understand strategic issues within H...
Workplace bullying is a highly prevalent form of psychosocial hazard that has been consistently linked to a range of negative individual and organizational outcomes. In the scholarly efforts to prevent workplace bullying, psychosocial safety climate (PSC) has been reported to be a powerful predictor of employee perceptions of exposure to bullying b...
The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted, to date, in an estimated 29 per cent of the New Zealand (NZ) workforce moving quickly from centralised work locations to full time working from home (WFH). The literature prior to these extraordinary events suggests WFH is beneficial for employee wellbeing and performance, and organisational outcomes, notably pro...
This paper is concerned with scholarly ergonomics and human factors (E/HF) contributions to date to the field of research inquiry known as the ‘future of work’. The review considers E/HF perspectives on how the nature of work is changing and what this means for the practice of E/HF and for human performance and wellbeing at work. This field of rese...
The impact of Artificial Intelligence and Automation (AIA) on the future of work has been the subject of significant amounts of discussion from scholars, business people, governments, and scientists. The purpose of this research was to explore managers' perceptions of AIA, and how they think it will impact the future of employment. Semi-structured...
This article examines the notion of green supply chain management (GSCM) in the New Zealand business context. Despite the increasing significance of the GSCM approach at the global level, there is a paucity of empirical research that explores GSCM within the New Zealand business context. This study intends to bridge the gap in the literature by inv...
The commitment of managers is one of the facilitators of participatory ergonomics (PE). However, to achieve this, practical practitioners’ strategies vary depending on the organizational context and type of stakeholder and are poorly described in the literature. The purpose of this paper is to describe and to analyze the process and strategies that...
Cyberbullying presents a new workplace issue with initial research demonstrating strong links to negative outcomes for individuals and organisations across a range of sectors. Yet, detailed accounts of target experiences of cyberbullying remain largely unexamined. To address this crucial research gap, this study explores nurses' experiences of work...
The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors that drive or prevent companies' implementation of sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) practices. To this end, we interviewed 29 senior managers from 23 New Zealand‐based companies. The key reported drivers were customer expectation, top management commitment, moral and ethical values of ma...
Telehealth, the provision of health care services at a distance, is one way to address increasing problems of resource scarcity and equity of access to healthcare. However, the literature suggests there are difficulties with embedding telehealth into routine care and that in the complex system of healthcare consideration of the multiple system comp...
Embedding of telehealth into routine care remains problematic and some scholars have
recommended a broader systems-approach to understand this with consideration of theoretical frameworks. The telehealth literature was searched using a systematic process and a large,diverse body was identified. Much of the research is atheoretical and when theories...
Much has been written about the negative aspects of flexibility, particularly around new and often unfair flexible contracts and working arrangements for workers that have eroded employee rights and damaged the employment relationship. However, this chapter deals with two much more promising phenomena: “anywhere working” (working remotely from the...
Aims:
To explore nurses' understandings and perceptions of workplace cyberbullying, in order to develop a relevant and meaningful definition of the phenomenon for future research and practice.
Background:
Although previous research places nurses at an elevated risk of exposure to traditional workplace bullying, there is a notable absence of rese...
Employee wellbeing and human sustainability have become increasingly acute issues within Japanese businesses. However, large corporations find it difficult to improve employee wellbeing and human sustainability in areas such as work-life balance, flexibility and gender diversity. To investigate the nature of conflicts, we conducted in-depth intervi...
Employment is changing at its core, particularly in the way in which work is organised
and carried out, and research around the welfare impacts of these changes for employees is increasing. This paper conducts a preliminary exploration into reported welfare impacts of these emerging forms of work in relation to an established taxonomy of psychosoci...
This report summarises the key findings of an exploratory study examining nurses’ experiences of workplace cyberbullying. For most targets workplace cyberbullying was experienced within a broader pattern of bullying behaviour; either through the co-occurrence of traditional bullying behaviours or via the presence of other targets within the workpla...
Workplace cyberbullying is becoming an increasingly relevant issue, but due to a lack of consensus on conceptualisation, little can be said about its prevalence and management. To this end, the present study engaged 20 subject-matter experts from New Zealand - including academics and practitioners - in a discussion around the topic. Previous resear...
Background:
The sustainability of the workforce is threatened due to working conditions. One of the reasons for this is an imbalance between the working conditions and the capacity of the workers.
Objective:
The objective of the paper, based on a literature review, is to explore the relationship between two main concepts, beginning with sustaina...
Telework is a critical component of business continuity following disruption to normal operations. Following the 2010-11 earthquake series in Christchurch, New Zealand, many organisations and their employees were forced to adopt telework due to building damage, access difficulties and loss of other infrastructure. Socio-technical systems (STS) theo...
The Stage of Change (SOC) approach has been proposed as a method to improve the implementation of ergonomics advice. However, despite evidence for its efficacy there is little evidence to suggest it has been adopted by ergonomics consultants. This paper investigates barriers and facilitators to the implementation, monitoring and effectiveness of er...
Purpose
Current research provides an incomplete picture of the challenges facing human resource personnel (HRP) tasked with managing a workplace bullying complaint. The purpose of this paper is to provide a holistic model of the complaint management process in order to advance the theorising of HRP’s role in this important process, and the challeng...
This study explored multiple perspectives of workplace violence through the examination of 138 independent court case transcripts from the New Zealand Employment Relations Authority and Employment Court – a data source that is unique and valuable as it provides perspectives that are otherwise difficult to access. Some of the identified risk factors...
Work related musculoskeletal disorders remain an intractable OHS problem. In 2002, Haslam proposed applying the stage of change model to target ergonomics interventions and other health and safety prevention activities. The stage of change model proposes that taking into account an individual's readiness for change in developing intervention strate...
(This link provides free access to the paper until 16 September 2015 - http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1RRg6rfpFBqB.)
Participatory ergonomics projects are traditionally applied within one organisation. In this study, a
participative approach was applied across the New Zealand meat processing industry, involving multiple organisations and geographic...
What makes a strategic human resource manager ‘strategic?’ Recent literature has made significant progress investigating strategic issues such as mediating factors of HR performance, but fundamental questions relating to the actors of the strategic process and the activity they undertake remain under examined. Our critical literature review present...
Sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) is increasingly becoming a topical issue for business research and practice. However, there is a dearth internationally of empirical research that has investigated the factors propelling companies to integrate or inhibiting them from integrating sustainability principles in their supply chain management (S...
Safety culture has been identified as a critical element of healthy and safe workplaces and as such warrants the attention of ergonomists involved in occupational health and safety (OHS). This study sought to evaluate a tool for assessing organisational safety culture as it impacts a common OHS problem: musculoskeletal disorders (MSD). The level of...
PurposeThis chapter explores the sustainability of the workforce in the Chilean logging sector, the factors that affect the sustainability of this critical element for the Chilean forestry sector and explores the reasons for each factor.
MethodologyTo achieve the aim of this research, an ergonomics approach was used, specifically an ergonomics ques...
A Report for Industry from the 2014 ACC funded Residential Construction Intervention Design project.
Workplace violence is a leading form of occupational injury and fatality, but has received little attention from the ergonomics research community. The paper reports findings from the 2012 New Zealand Workplace Violence Survey, and examines the workplace violence experience of 86 New Zealand organisations and the perceptions of occupational health...
This study evaluated a tool (MSD CAT) for assessing organisational safety culture as it impacts work-related musculoskeletal disorders (MSD). The study assessed the level of MSD cultural advancement and identified measures for improving MSD culture. Interviews were conducted with 39 staff from two organisations in residential healthcare and timber...
This exploratory study examined the workplace violence problem in a sample of 96 New Zealand
organisations. Just over one-half of participating organisations reported cases of violence, with a
total of nearly 2,500 cases reported in 2009. The incidence rate for all violence cases was high
compared with internationally reported rates. Highest violen...
The first of its kind in New Zealand, this new title focuses on the important issues within both human resources management and employment relations. The book actively seeks to raise academic, policy-maker and practitioner awareness of the key debates that need to be addressed to help New Zealand organisations to adopt more cutting-edge approaches...
The present study was the third NZ Workplace Violence Survey. The sample of 86 organisations for the 2012 New Zealand Workplace Violence Survey was drawn from the OHS professionals who subscribe to the New Zealand Safeguard Forum. Overall, some 510 incidents of workplace violence were reported with 299 of these being physical assaults. More than on...
Workplace bullying is of significant concern for organisations internationally. With increasing
understanding of the prevalence and consequences of bullying, research attention has turned to
exploring effective prevention strategies. Yet, whilst primary prevention is strongly advocated in
the literature, the role of the legislative context in su...
Bullying has a toxic effect on the workplace. Left unchecked workplace bullying can produce significant damage to the target and witnesses (Einarsen, Hoel, Zapf, & Cooper, 2011). Alongside the individual costs, workplace bullying can ripple through an organisation to inflict substantial direct and indirect organisational costs (Caponecchia, Sun, &...
https://books.google.co.nz/books/about/Situational_Analysis_of_Employment_Polic.html?id=zSemoAEACAAJ&redir_esc=y
While the safety culture literature has grown in abundance during the past two
decades, virtually nothing has been published on the perceptions of health and safety
practitioners on the concept of safety culture. This paper reports findings from a webbased
survey of 100 New Zealand occupational health and safety (OHS) professionals,
which explored...
International studies continue to highlight the extent of workplace violence and its impact on employees and organizations. Despite a number of high profile incidents of workplace violence in New Zealand in recent years, there has been little work to establish the nature and extent of workplace violence in New Zealand. The present study aimed to pr...
This paper considers the role of contextual factors in two forms of ‘everyday’ workplace injuries:
musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) and slips, trips and falls (STFs). Most research on these types of
workplace injuries has been concerned with immediate, physical causes with comparatively little research
focused on a broad systems approach to injury...
This paper conceptualises organisational safety culture and considers its relevance to ergonomics practice. Issues discussed in the paper include the modest contribution that ergonomists and ergonomics as a discipline have made to this burgeoning field of study and the significance of safety culture to a systems approach. The relevance of safety cu...
In New Zealand, the highest incidence of musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) is found in
meat processing, accounting for over half the injury compensation costs for the sector.
This thesis reports on a two-year study of MSD in the New Zealand meat processing
industry, with the aims of identifying MSD risk factors and interventions using an
industry-lev...
When there has been a workplace injury claims are made to ACC for reimbursement of medical fees or, for more serious injuries, earnings compensation. A detailed analysis of two years of data collected between 2005 – 2007 reveal that there were just over 10,400 claims made by house construction workers such as carpenters and joiners, building and re...
Data on musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) in meat processing and the tasks in which they occur is limited in the literature. This paper provides a summary of such data from the New Zealand industry. Despite the high incidence of MSD in meat processing in New Zealand, little research has been undertaken to identify and assess high-risk tasks and devel...
Musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) are the leading cause of occupational injury internationally. In New Zealand, the highest incidence of MSD is in meat processing, accounting for over half the injury compensation costs for the sector. MSD in meat processing have proven highly resistant to physical, micro-level interventions, suggesting a new approach...
Musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) are the most commonly reported occupational injury claim type in New Zealand and internationally. Although the risk factors for work-related MSD are well recognised, much of the research emphasis has been on the role of physical, psychosocial and individual factors, while the organisational and contextual factors tha...
This article presents findings from a case study evaluation of a framework for understanding the development of organisational safety culture. The focus of the study was a publicly owned New Zealand utility organisation. The aims of the study were to qualitatively determine the level of development for a number of aspects of safety culture, and to...
Research into injury occurrence and injury prevention in timber processing was funded by FRST in 2001-2003 and by ACC in 2006/7. Further research was proposed to inform subsequent work systems analyses and development of case studies based on successful interventions that have been implemented within the industry. The overall aim of the on-going wo...
Safety culture is becoming an increasingly important focus for researchers and professionals in the health and safety field. This paper briefly considers the concept of organisational safety culture and its relevance to ergonomics practice. The paper focuses on the qualitative measurement of safety culture, and reports findings from a study of the...
A descriptive epidemiological analysis was undertaken of all accepted ACC claims for timber processing industries, for the two-year period, 1 st January 2005 – 31 st December 2006. Over 11,000 claims were analysed. • Around 43% of all claims were musculoskeletal disorders (73% of the soft tissue injuries were musculoskeletal disorders injury types)...
There is little published literature examining sawmilling injury prevention (IP) and the modest material available does generally not evaluate the implementation of interventions. There is even less material that is specific to New Zealand and recent; although the reports and publications by COHFE contribute to progress in addressing musculoskeleta...
Slip, trip and fall (STF) incidents, particularly falls from a height, are a leading cause of injury in the New Zealand residential construction industry. The most common origins of falls from a height in this sector are ladders, scaffolding and roofs, while slipping is the most frequent fall initiating event category. The study aimed to provide de...
A series of studies over two years were conducted to establish the nature of slips, trips and falls (STF) on New Zealand dairy farms, and to identify potential interventions to reduce their incidence and severity. There were three major research phases: an exploratory phase to determine key areas of risk within each industry sector; an analysis pha...
The paper presents findings from 39 detailed follow-up investigations of slips, trips and falls (STF) incurred by individuals working in New Zealand's dairy farming industry. The study sought to identify the key contributory risk factors for STF in this sector to provide evidence to support intervention design, and to determine the effectiveness of...
This paper reports findings from a study which evaluated the draft New Zealand Code of Practice for Manual Handling. The evaluation assessed the ease of use, applicability and validity of the Code and in particular the associated manual handling hazard assessment tools, within New Zealand industry. The Code was studied in a sample of eight companie...
The paper presents findings from a government funded, industry-based study of timber handling tasks in New Zealand log sawmills, and discusses some of the issues encountered in conducting a long term study of this type. Twelve months' of accident register records from a sample of log sawmills were first analysed to determine the tasks most commonly...
Slips, trips and falls are the leading cause of injury in the New Zealand dairy farming industry. This article reports findings from the first phase of a major two-year project concerned with the identification of risk factors and effective interventions to reduce the risk of dairy farming STF injuries. Data on 475 claims to the Accident Compensati...
Since 1984 New Zealand has had a national Forest Industry Accident Reporting Scheme (ARS) which collects injury and near miss reports from forest companies. The ARS is used by the Centre for Human Factors and Ergonomics (COHFE) (formally the Logging Industry Research Organisation) to guide its forest industry injury prevention research and developm...
In 2001 COHFE began researching Musculoskeletal Disorders (MSD) in sawmills with the aims of: • determining the prevalence of musculoskeletal problems amongst sawmill workers, • identifying high-risk sawmill tasks, and then • designing and evaluating measures to prevent or alleviate musculoskeletal problems in these tasks. Twelve months of Accident...
The incidence and nature of musculoskeletal disorders (MSD) within the NZ log sawmilling industry are not well defined. No single body collates injury and incident data to a sufficiently detailed level, and there is little reported New Zealand research that has sought to identify key risk factors for wood processing work. Anecdotal reports from ind...
Forestry is among the most hazardous of all industry sectors internationally. In New Zealand, highest work-related morbidity and mortality incidence rates are found in the logging sector. The New Zealand Forest Industry Accident Reporting Scheme (ARS) is a forestry injury surveillance system maintained by the Centre for Human Factors and Ergonomics...