Operational Team Leader Behaviors in a High Reliability-Risk Technical Environment: Analysis of Critical Incidents

Abstract

Leaders in high reliability-risk environments play an important role in understanding the complexities of their context and implementing via behaviors with their teams during work activities. Based on the importance of understanding leader behaviors in a high consequence environment an exploratory study at a nuclear power plant was chosen. Current high reliability-risk leadership literature has not been studied in the area of leader-based incident occurrence and has also not been assessed using the methodology of analyzing critical incidents. The findings of this research inductively contribute to high reliability theory by empirically tying leaders (via leader behaviors) to critical incidents (performance outcome). The use of the nuclear power industry as an exploratory platform (due to minimal existing work) achieved an understanding which leader behaviors influenced the performance outcome (critical incident) in a high reliability-risk technical environment. The study utilized the underpinning of the high reliability leadership framework and added to this literature stream with contextual critical incident analysis that identified leadership behaviors during evolutions that caused incidents. The findings indicated themes related to responsiveness, maintaining alignment, and method of engagement; maintaining roles and responsibilities, and assigning oversight to correct and coach; rigor of situational risk assessment, and willingness to deviate; understanding intent of standards/policies/procedures, and technical understanding which emerged as key categories. Further abstraction revealed higher order categories of teamwork, communication, decision-making and knowledge. Using the depth of contextual detail that the results provided, a high reliability-risk grounded theory leader-based incident model was generated. The research suggests that in highly technical industries, studies of context-based, non-technical behavioral competencies are important to understand prior to placing personnel in key leadership positions, adding to the less studied high reliability literature. The findings and model generated suggest a significant revision to the most recent (2018) high reliability conceptual model with empirically driven detailed findings, which was the premise of this research. Additionally, these findings indicate leader-environment fit gaps specific to a particular environment, and also identify a problem in the lack of initiating structure and the consequences associated with it. Finally, I also identify the leader-member exchange leading up to a known outcome in a high reliability-risk field. The insights of this research for practitioners is the application of findings to their firm’s leadership teams to improve culture, performance management, training, and knowledge management. Academically this work induces further theory which supports more knowledge creation and debate in literature. Future researchers can apply different methods and contexts for study using the model developed therefore addressing the limitations.