Cliff W. Scott

Organizing Ambiguity: A Grounded Theory of Leadership and Sensemaking Within Dangerous Contexts

Leaders in high-reliability organizational contexts such as firefighting, emergency medicine, and law enforcement often face the challenge of making sense of environments that are dangerous, highly ambiguous, and rapidly changing. Most leadership research, however, has focused on more stable conditions. This study analyzed 100 reports of “near-miss” situations in which firefighters narrowly escaped injury or death, drawing upon sensemaking and high-reliability organizational theories to provide a grounded theory of leadership processes within extreme events. Themes related to direction setting, knowledge, talk, role acting, role modeling, trust, situational awareness, and agility were key categories. Further abstraction of the data revealed the higher-order categories of framing, heedful interrelating, and adjusting as key characteristics of the overall social process of leadership within dangerous contexts, labeled organizing ambiguity. These findings highlight leadership as a collective sensemaking process in which ambiguity is reduced and resilience promoted in the face of danger via interaction among and between leaders and followers.

After-action reviews: A venue for the promotion of safety climate

This study investigated the role of after-action reviews on perceptions of safety climate at the group and organizational levels. Moderated and mediated regression analyses of data from 67 firefighting crews suggest that after-action review frequency positively influenced both levels of safety climate. Safety-oriented group norms fully mediated the relationship between after-action review frequency and group-level safety climate. Fire-station busyness moderated the relationship between after-action review frequency and organizational-level safety climate, such that the relationship was non-existent for highly busy stations. These findings suggest that after-action reviews constitute a specific venue through which managers can promote safety climate in high-risk environments.

Wasted Time and Money in Meetings: Increasing Return on Investment

Meetings are a significant investment for organizations and the groups that comprise them, but the small group literature has often neglected the direct study of meetings. This article closes the special issue on work meetings by exploring the costs associated with unnecessary or poorly facilitated meetings and proposes a three-stage model that groups and organizations may use to assure that the time invested in meetings is more likely to deliver a return on the resources invested.

Leading Group Meetings: Supervisors’ Actions, Employee Behaviors, and Upward Perceptions

This study focuses on a common-yet-understudied group process: supervisor-led group meetings at work. Specifically, the study explores the relationships among employees’ perceptions and reported behaviors with regard to such meetings. Respondents are 291 adults working in different organizations. Structural equation modeling of the data largely supports the hypothesized model. Employee perceptions of relationship quality with their supervisors (leader–member exchange) fully mediates the relationship between perceptions of supervisors’ fairness (interactional justice) in group meetings and perceived organizational support. Leader–member exchange also fully mediates the relationship between interactional justice perceptions and meeting citizenship behaviors—a new construct describing extra-role behaviors that support meeting processes—and between good meeting practices by the supervisors and meeting citizenship behaviors. Leader–member exchange partially mediates the relationship between good meeting practices and perceived organizational support. These findings highlight the importance both of supervisors’ behaviors within meetings that they lead and of the supervisor-led group meeting itself as a phenomenon worthy of future exploration.

Meetings at Work Advancing the Theory and Practice of Meetings

Although advances in communication technology were once expected to diminish the need for synchronous work meetings, meeting activity in organizations continues to rise. Regrettably, the time and energy employees spend in work meetings is not matched by the amount of direct attention group and organizational scholars have paid to meeting phenomena. This special issue of Small Group Research helps to address this gap by presenting empirical studies of work meetings that explore the theory and practice of work meetings.

Understanding Workplace Meetings: A Qualitative Taxonomy of Meeting Purposes

Purpose - – The purpose of this study is to propose a taxonomy of meeting purpose. Meetings are a workplace activity that deserves increased attention from researchers and practitioners. Previous researchers attempted to develop typologies of meeting purpose with limited success. Through a comparison of classification methodologies, the authors consider a taxonomy as the appropriate classification scheme for meeting purpose. The authors then utilize the developed taxonomy to investigate the frequency with which a representative sample of working adults engaged in meetings of these varying purposes. Their proposed taxonomy provides relevant classifications for future research on meetings as well and serves as a useful tool for managers seeking to use and evaluate the effectiveness of meetings within their organizations. Design/methodology/approach - – This study employs an inductive methodology using discourse analysis of qualitative meeting descriptions to develop a taxonomy of meeting purpose. The authors discourse analysis utilizes open-ended survey responses from a sample of working adults ( Findings - – The authors categorical analysis of open-ended questions resulted in a 16-category taxonomy of meeting purpose. The two most prevalent meeting purpose categories in this sample were “to discuss ongoing projects” at 11.6 per cent and “to routinely discuss the state of the business” at 10.8 per cent. The two least common meeting purpose categories in this sample were “to brainstorm for ideas or solutions” at 3.3 per cent and “to discuss productivity and efficiencies” at 3.7 per cent. The taxonomy was analyzed across organizational type and employee job level to identify differences between those important organizational and employee characteristics. Research limitations/implications - – The data suggested that meetings were institutionalized in organizations, making them useful at identifying differences between organizations as well as differences in employees in terms of scope of responsibility. Researchers and managers should consider the purposes for which they call meetings and how that manifests their overarching organizational focus, structure and goals. Originality/value - – This is the first study to overtly attempt to categorize the various purposes for which meetings are held. Further, this study develops a taxonomy of meeting purposes that will prove useful for investigating the different types of meeting purposes in a broad range of organizational types and structures.

Situational pressures that influence firefighters' decision making about personal protective equipment: A qualitative analysis

OBJECTIVES Firefighters are exposed to hazardous conditions as a result of their occupation and often understand the dangers of these toxic exposures; yet, it remains unclear why some refrain from wearing personal protective equipment (PPE) in dangerous situations. We were intrigued by the gap between demonstrated safety knowledge and lack of connection to observed or self-reported safety behaviors, an issue about which there is limited consensus among scholars. METHODS In a national study of fire service safety climate, 123 firefighters across 12 fire departments participated in 62 interviews and 10 focus groups. RESULTS Firefighter identity, goal seduction, and situation aversion were the strongest factors of PPE non-compliance, whereas PPE empowerment and individual will promoted PPE use within a fire department. CONCLUSIONS Understanding situations where PPE use is both practiced and neglected is imperative to improving fire service safety culture. Peer-pressure and leading by example at the peer and organizational levels appear to be essential considerations firefighters undertake when choosing whether or not to engage in safety behavior.

The Signal Provision of Emotion: Using Emotions to Enhance Reliability Via Sensemaking

High reliability organization (HRO) theory suggests that early detection of and swift responses to potentially hazardous and situation changing events in organizational environments is central to the sustainability of reliable operations. Limited research on HRO’s (e.g. military groups and firefighters) considers how normative demands on feeling and emotion help to explain why some events are recognized and responded to while others not. In this article, we propose a model of enactment of anomalous events (i.e., situation changing events) that considers the manner in which emotions are regulated in high reliability contexts and how this influences the extent to which early indicators of anomalous events are heeded or dismissed. In this article, we seek to provide a theoretical framework for explaining both the enabling mechanisms by which emotions may function as a signaling resource in the detection of anomalous events and the constraining mechanisms through when emotion regulation processes may inhibit reliability. We discuss implications of the model for researchers and practitioners in high reliability organizations.

Organizational Identification: A Context‐Specific Mitigating Resource of Work–Family Conflict

The tension between work and non‐work life remains a critical issue in contemporary careers. This study explores the role of organizational identification (OI) in reducing work–family conflict (WFC) within demanding and high‐stakes jobs in dynamic, uncertain and potentially dangerous contexts (e.g., firefighting). Survey data from 341 firefighters suggest that, congruent with conservation of resources theory and scarcity theory, OI may serve as a resource that mitigates WFC in these contexts. Additionally, the data suggest that the negative relationship between OI and WFC is stronger when trauma is low. For practice, this study provides important implications for employees in similar contexts concerning potential ways to mitigate WFC as well as recommendations concerning exposure to trauma.

Debriefs: Teams Learning From Doing in Context

Debriefs are a type of work meeting in which teams discuss, interpret, and learn from recent events during which they collaborated. In a variety of forms, debriefs are found across a wide range of organizational types and settings. Well-conducted debriefs can improve team effectiveness by 25% across a variety of organizations and settings. For example, the U.S. military adopted debriefs decades ago to promote learning and performance across the various services. Subsequently, debriefs have been introduced in the medical field, the fire service, aviation, education, and in a variety of organizational training and simulation environments. After a discussion of various purposes for which debriefs have been used, we proceed with a historical review of development of the concepts and use in industries and contexts. We then review the psychological factors relevant to debrief effectiveness and the outcomes for individuals, teams, and organizations that deploy debriefs. Future directions of particular interest to team researchers across a variety of psychological disciplines are presented along with a review of how best to implement debriefs from a practical perspective.