ABSTRACT
The present chapter discusses a contemporary view of organizational safety that emphasizes the ‘decision dilemmas’ or ‘performance trade-offs’ faced by practitioners and managers in everyday work. A number of studies have recognized practitioners' dilemmas in balancing productivity and safety requirements at the same time. Practitioners have to reach their safety and productivity goals, neither of which should be achieved at the expense of the other. Organizations are also seeking ways to preserve their level of economic performance without degrading their safety margins. As industrial systems grow in complexity, their work demands also increase - for example, do more, faster, cheaper, and better. Organizations try to amplify their own capabilities to control complexity (the VSM principle of variety) by engaging more practitioners in the system (that is, ensure a multiplicity of perspectives), by balancing tasks between practitioners and automation and by delegating authority to multiple levels in the system. However, this increase in the capabilities and the operating modes of the organization may also create several decision trade-offs such as, multiplicity of views vs coordination cost, manual vs automated control and centralized vs decentralized control.
