ABSTRACT

Motivated by strong interest and personal experience with trust in safety critical organisations a study on the manageability of this phenomenon has been conducted in the authors professional area, aviation. The pivotal role of trust in contributing to safety is well described in academic and empirical research, therefore special interest has been directed on the question how can this contributor, trust, be managed, or engineered to contribute to safety performance within High Reliability Organisations (HROs), defined by exposure to high risks with high losses at stake. The research approach consisted of interviewing three safety managers and a questionnaire survey on a small population of three companies in the Swiss German aircraft maintenance industry. It was empirically confirmed that the formation and improvement of trust can be enhanced indirectly by supporting certain antecedents of trust. The findings also suggest that directly managing or engineering trust is not possible, as trust is of a multifaceted nature that is built upon affective and cognitive antecedents. The parallel existence of trust and mistrust have triggered the question about confidence and criticism, which are perceived in literature as opposite or related aspects. Despite the notion that trust and confidence do not exist simultaneously, all other concepts are seen as potentially coexistent within HROs. The existing model of Conchie and Donald on safety specific functional/dysfunctional forms of trust has been developed further and now includes an enhanced view on affective and cognitive antecedents of trust or confidence. It was also found that clarification is needed about the biases of intention, action, relational aspects and judgements about the past/ presence orientation of trust and confidence motivation. As this study was carried out within a fast changing environment and based on a very small sample from a closely defined population additional research would add greater reliability to the findings. The value of this paper lies in finalizing eight actionable recommendations to managers in aviation maintenance including the need for a clear differentiation between trust and confidence, role model awareness, governance, leadership, transparency, and 4

fairness. These recommendations derived from empirical study may also be valuable to other industries and operations whereas the need to clarify the transferability of findings and data between different kinds and geographies of HROs through further studies has been identified. Additional research areas would include clarification on peer-to-peer relations in safety reporting, and the correlation of game theory and trust in individual deliberation processes.

The word count of this dissertation from chapter 1 including chapter 7 as analysed by Microsoft WORD is 15806