Social Environment & Responsibility

Social Environment :

Responsibilities are the duties that we are supposed to do due to our job or position. Some of job is carried out independently and some job carried out along with team, as a part of team or group.

Individual Responsibility - AME's  are skilled individuals having undertaken   considerable training,   working in a highly professional environment and generally have considerable pride in their work and its contribution to air safety.

All individuals, regardless of their role, grade or qualifications should work in a responsible manner. 

 Certifying Staff shall be responsible for ensuring that work is performed and recorded in a satisfactory manner...”.
Non-certifying Staff also have a responsibility in the maintenance process.  CAR145  AMO must establish the    competence of every person, whether directly involved in hands-on maintenance or not.
Group or Team Responsibility -

Advantages are that each member of the group ought to feel responsible for the output of that group, not just their own output as an individual, and ought to work towards ensuring that the whole ‘product’ is safe. This may involve cross-checking others’ work (even when not strictly required), politely challenging others if you think that something is not quite right, etc.

Disadvantage of group responsibility is that it can potentially act against safety,
with responsibility being devolved to such an extent that no-one feels personally
responsible for safety ( diffusion of responsibility). Here, an individual,
on his own, may take action but, once placed within a group situation, he may not act
if none of the other group members do so, each member of the group or team
assuming that ‘someone else will do it’.
Intergroup conflict in which situations evolve where a small group may act cohesively as a team, but rivalries may arise between this team and others (e.g. between engineers and planner    between shifts, ...). 

Implications in terms of responsibility, with teams failing to share responsibility between them. 

This is particularly pertinent to change of responsibility at shift handovers, where members of the outgoing shift may feel no ‘moral’ responsibility for waiting for the incoming shift members to arrive and giving a verbal handover in support of the written information on the workcards or task sheets,
whereas they might feel such responsibility when handing over tasks to others withintheir own shift.
Group polarisation is the tendency for groups to make decisions that are more extreme than the individual members’ initial positions. At times, group polarisation
results in more cautious decisions. Alternatively, in other situations, a group may arrive at a course of action that is riskier than that which any individual member might
pursue. This is known as risky shift. Another example of group polarisation is groupthink in which the desire of the group to reach unanimous agreement
overrides any individual impulse to adopt proper, rational (and responsible) decisionmaking procedures.
Social loafing has been coined to reflect the tendency for some individuals to workless hard on a task when they believe others are working on it. In other words, they
 consider that their own efforts will be pooled with that of other group members and not seen in isolation.
Teams may comprise a number of individuals working together towards one shared goal. Alternatively, they may consist of a number of individuals working in parallel
to achieve one common goal.                  Teams generally have a recognised leader and one or more follower(s). Teams need to be built up and their identity as a team needs to be maintained in some way.
Important Elements of Team Working - For teams to function cohesively and productively, team members need to have or build up certain interpersonal and social skills. These include communication, cooperation, co-ordination and mutual support

Good Safety Culture