ABSTRACT
Major organizational accidents such as the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, the explosion of the Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant in 1987, the accident with off-shore platform Piper Alpha in 1988 or the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003, highlighted the relevance of human contributions to organizational safety. Investigations traditionally considered technical and human factors in the development and prevention of these negative events but, in spite of such operational perspective, statistics have revealed the preponderance of human factors in up to 60-70 percent of the situations (e.g., Dekker, 2002).
