Citation

Culvenor J. Safety Sci. 2003; 41(6): 543-556.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2003, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Knowledge about how best to solve problems in occupational health and safety and how to be innovative in general is important to all industry. With the advent of non-prescriptive workplace safety legislation in Australia (and internationally), the need for problem solving at an enterprise level has never been greater. The legislation calls for problem solving to take place via a cooperative approach between employers and employees and this manifests itself as committees, risk improvement teams and the like. Unfortunately research in problem solving generally has showed us that interacting teamwork is less effective that individual thinking in terms of generating solutions to problems. However, there has been little research on the comparison of individuals and teams as regards the decision-making stage of problem solving that must naturally follow the idea generation stage. This research compared individuals and teams based on decision-making in health and safety. Subjects were 294 manufacturing industry employees arranged into 38 teams. Subjects ranked solutions to safety problems individually and then repeated the exercise in teams where they sought to develop a team consensus. The average of individual judgements were compared with the team consensus judgements in a paired design. The results indicate that the consensus judgement of the teams was much better than the average of the individuals that comprised the team. The implications are that, while idea generation is probably best achieved individually, judgements and decision about solutions is probably best performed through a consensus approach.