Are safety and operational effectiveness contradictory requirements: The roles of routines and relational coordination

• Published date: 01 May 2015
• Author: Robert Klassen,David Johnston,Anton Shevchenko,Mark Pagell,Sharvani Sharma
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2015.02.002
• Date: 01 May 2015

Journal of Operations Management 36 (2015) 1–14

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Operations Management

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jom

Are safety and operational effectiveness contradictory requirements:

The roles of routines and relational coordination

Mark Pagella,∗, Robert Klassen b, David Johnstonc, Anton Shevchenko c, Sharvani Sharmac

aUCD Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, University College Dublin, Carysfort Avenue, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland

bIvey School of Business, The University of Western Ontario, 1151 Richmond Street North, London, ON, Canada N6A 3K7

cOperations Management and Information Systems, Schulich School of Business, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, ON, Canada M3J 1P3

article info

Article history:

Received 9 May 2014

Received in revised form 4 February 2015

Accepted 16 February 2015

Available online 25 February 2015

Accepted by Daniel R Guide

Keywords:

Safety

Routines

Contradictory requirements

Relational coordination

abstract

The relationship between managing a production system to be safe and managing it to be operationally

effective is often described in conflicting terms, creating confusion for research and practice. Some view

improving safety as separate and distinct from increasing operational effectiveness; they are contradic-

tory requirements. Others emphasize that safety and effectiveness are complementary, and combine to

enhance competitiveness. Recent research proposes that this confusion can be explained by examining

the operational and safety routines used in production. Specifically, when an organization chooses to

manage safety and operations in a coordinated fashion using a joint management system, safety and

operational effectiveness are complementary. Yet, the contradiction between safety and operations can

occur when the functions are managed as separate and unequal silos. This research tests this supposition

using the theory of relational coordination. The results, based on a combination of survey and archival

safety data from 198 manufacturing firms, show that safety and operational outcomes are indirectly

related via routines and that plants that manage safety and operations using a joint management sys-

tem make these priorities complementary and do not create trade-offs between safety and operational

performance.

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

One of the most enduring discourses in management revolves

around how managers and organizations think about and respond

to multiple, often-contradictory demands. For instance, Burns and

Stalker’s (1961) seminal work suggesting that organizations should

respond to different environmental demands with different struc-

tures provides a foundation for the theory surrounding relational

bureaucracy (Gittell and Douglass, 2012). Similarly, the role of

trade-offs in operations strategy was introduced into the opera-

tions management literature by Skinner (1969), and is still debated

today; for instance in discussions of “Does it pay to be green or

sustainable” (Golicic and Smith, 2013).

This discourse has progressed along two interrelated trajec-

tories. The first trajectory is more prevalent in the operations

management community, where the issue of competing demands

or trade-offs has mostly been addressed from a do they exist per-

spective (Ferdows and De Meyer, 1990; Rosenzweig and Easton,

2010). The second trajectory explores how managers and organi-

zations respond to potentially competing demands. Research on

∗Corresponding author. Tel.: +353 17168851.

E-mail address: mark.pagell@ucd.ie (M. Pagell).

ambivalence (Ashforth et al., 2014) focuses on situations where

managers have competing perspectives on the same “object” and

has started to examine how an individual manager deals with

this potential disconnect. Similarly, research on paradox (Smith

and Lewis, 2011) and ambidexterity (Birkinshaw and Gupta, 2013)

examines how organizations respond to the tension that is cre-

ated when they face competing demands. These discussions use

a variety of terms to define and explore overlapping constructs

(Ashforth et al., 2014; Smith and Lewis, 2011), though generally

at the individual (ambivalence) or organizational (ambidexterity)

level of analysis, rather than the operational level.

Our manuscript contributes to this debate by examining two

potentially competing goals for operating a production system,

namely being safe and being operationally effective (Brown, 1996;

Pagell et al., 2014; Zohar, 2002). We examine these poten-

tially contradictory priorities, or goals not by asking if there are

trade-offs, but rather by exploring if the management of the pro-

duction system determines if these priorities are complementary

or contradictory. Thus, we propose that organizational choices

regarding routines used in production determine the degree to

which trade-offs occur. In so doing we make contributions to

our understanding of socially sustainable operations, as well as

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jom.2015.02.002

0272-6963/© 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.