Nuclear power plant shift supervisor's decision making during microincidents

The aim of this paper is to examine the cognitive processes through which operators make decisions when dealing with microincidents during their actual work, and to determine whether they use a naturalistic or normative decision making strategy. That is, do they try to recognize a microincident as familiar and base decisions on pattern recognition, tacit knowledge, or condition-action rules (naturalistic), or do they need to concurrently compare and contrast options, before selecting the best possible according standard operating procedures (normative)? The method employed for data collection was a cognitive task analysis (CTA) based on operators' activities. The main finding of this research was that decision making is primarily based on naturalistic strategies. These findings contrast the normative behavior prescribed by the organization's work design and their standards of competency for training and evaluation operators work. Relevance to industry: This study presents a situated method to describe how sharp end operators make decisions during microincidents that occurs in normal operation, emphasizing how the sociotechnical environment affects their cognitive strategies, which is one of the basic steps for an organization that wants to enhance the safety culture. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.