Ship Leadership, Situation Awareness, and Crew Safety Behaviour—Preregistered Replications in Two Survey Datasets

Abstract

Situation awareness is often assumed to be crucial for working safely. Self-reported context-general measures can be an efficient way to measure situation awareness in large datasets and test how it relates to other individual, organizational, and environmental variables. In a previous structural equation model (Sætrevik & Hystad, 2017) authentic leadership accounted for situation awareness and self-report of committing unsafe actions, while situation awareness accounted for subjective risk assessment and commitment of unsafe actions. The current study performed preregistered replications of the same associations in two novel but similar datasets. Both datasets replicated that higher situation awareness was associated with fewer unsafe actions and with lower subjective risk assessment. One of the new datasets measured leadership, and more authentic leadership was found to be associated with higher situation awareness and fewer unsafe actions. The preregistered structural equation models explained large amounts of the variance in situation awareness and unsafe actions and medium to large amounts of the variance in subjective risk assessment. We also tested adjusted models that incorporated more of the measured items and improved the validity of the measures. The study supports the claim that a crewmember’s cognitive states (such as perception, understanding, and prediction of safety signals) are associated with safety outcomes and that leadership qualities may facilitate this relationship. This preregistered replication in two novel datasets increases the reliability of the previously identified relationships.