L.s. Fruhen

Curtin University · Future of Work Institute

Cyclists are vulnerable road users who are more likely than others to be involved and injured in accidents and crashes. To enhance cyclists’ safety, governments around the world have introduced bicycle passing distance laws, yet research into the effectiveness of these laws is still limited. This study examines the changes in driver behaviour (pass...

Objectives This study investigates perceived barriers towards the implementation of multiprofessional team briefings (MPTB) in operating theatres, as well as ways to overcome these perceived barriers. Previous research shows that MPTB can enhance teamwork and communication, but are underused in operating theatres. By adopting a multilevel systems p...

Cycling for transportation has multiple benefits to both individuals and societies. However, in many countries, cycling rates are very low. One major deterrent is hostile or aggressive behaviours directed towards cyclists. Past research has established that negative attitudes towards cyclist are a major driver of aggressive behaviour. However, the...

Introduction: Perceived management safety commitment as an aspect of safety climate or culture is a key influence on safety outcomes in organizations. What is unclear is how perceptions of management commitment are created by leaders. Method: To address this gap in the literature, we position safety commitment as a leadership construct viewed fr...

The Publisher regrets that this article is an accidental duplication of an article that has already been published in Journal of Safety Research, 68 (2019) 203-214, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2018.12.011. The duplicate article has therefore been withdrawn. The full Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal can be found at https://www.elsevier.com/ab...

When we talk or write, we implicitly reveal more about ourselves than we realise. Language and use of particular words can be strong proxies for current emotions, motivations, and even personality. Due to the development of powerful computational programs that allow to quantify word usage and linguistic markers, organisational researchers have incr...

Practitioner views on good safety leadership constitute implicit leadership theories. Themes in the descriptions of best practices in safety leadership, illustrate what behaviours are seen as most effective and may be most beneficial in leader development. Paricipants of this study (n=112) completed an online survey consisting of open questions reg...

Positive associations between physical attractiveness and employee reward are well-documented within the organisational literature. Although the impact of facial cues to trustworthiness and dominance on a number of social outcomes has been established outside of the workplace, the extent to which they, in addition to attractiveness, affect pay at d...

The interaction of car drivers and cyclists is one of the main causes of cycle incidents. The role of attitudes and social norms in shaping car drivers' aggressive behaviour towards cyclists, is not well understood and merits investigation. A sample of 276 drivers completed an online questionnaire concerning their attitudes towards cyclists, attitu...

Managers rarely have full and unequivocal data on their external environment or on the state of their internal processes and in this paper we discuss how they deal with ambiguity, in relation to organizational safety. Drawing on our research into managers’ safety intelligence and on the value of chronic unease for safety management, we show how bot...

The high reliability literature describes a sense of chronic unease as supporting managers’ ability to deal with (safety) risks. This concept has been proposed to contain five components, namely the traits of propensity to worry, pessimism, and the cognitive abilities of requisite imagination, flexible thinking and vigilance. We study their applica...

Senior managers’ safety commitment is emphasised in the safety literature as a crucial influence on organisational safety. Yet there is little understanding of the characteristics that underpin their ability to engage in behaviours that demonstrate safety commitment. This study investigates the contribution of problem-solving, social competence and...

To achieve a high level of safety, managers of organisations in hazardous industries need to maintain a state of constant wariness towards the management of risks, often conceptualised as ‘chronic unease’. Despite the prevalence of this term in the literature, there is limited evidence to enable a definition or operationalisation of this concept. T...

The joint influence of safety specific team processes and general team processes on safety outcomes is not fully understood. This study investigates how cohesion (task and social) and error culture (error management and error aversion culture) relate to accident occurrence in low and high risk situations. A sample of 30 fire fighting teams (N = 199...

Senior managers can have a strong influence on organisational safety. But little is known about which of their personal attributes support their impact on safety. In this paper, we introduce the concept of 'safety intelligence' as related to senior managers' ability to develop and enact safety policies and explore possible characteristics related t...

Workers engaging in voluntary and unrewarded environmental actions that go above and beyond their job requirements in an organizational setting can crucially contribute to a reduced environmental impact of organizations. This research investigates some of the factors that may contribute to the emergence of such organizational citizenship behaviour...

Senior managers can influence safety culture and it is therefore important to understand how they think about this aspect of their organisation. Examining senior managers’ interpretations of safety culture (via content and artefacts like language), is one way to address this issue. Safety culture descriptions obtained through interviews with senior...

Safety Intelligence is about how to stay sharp on safety while growing the business. This document expands on the three components of Safety Intelligence, using quotes from Senior Executives in Europe and North America to emphasise key points.

The present study investigates what traits, skills and knowledge of senior executive managers are believed to affect safety outcomes in air traffic management. The impact of senior executive managers on safety outcomes has frequently been highlighted by the academic literature and practitioners, but it has not been fully investigated how these mana...