Comparison of Organisational Cultures at Two NPP Maintenance Units - When is Maintenance Work Motivating and Meaningful?

摘要

Maintenance of a nuclear power plant (NPP) is a complex activity characterised by many coupled subsystems, uncertainty in the data available to the workers, mediated interaction via various tools and potentially high hazards. The activities in maintenance organisations include preventive maintenance, planned outages, modifications and different kinds of fault repairs. Correct working of the machinery and technology is critical to both plant safety and efficiency. Thus, appropriate maintenance strategies, efficient procedures and skilful work are the key factors of reliability at NPPs. How an organisation can achieve this? Cultural perspective aims at investigating the norms, principles and meanings that guide the behaviour in the organisation. The value of a cultural approach to maintenance work is that it enables a generic view of the social dynamics in a complex and diverse domain. Furthermore, one of the central features of any culture is that it forms routines, preconceptions and rules-of-thumb in order to maintain internal cohesion [see e.g. 11], These conceptions are difficult to change and they may not always be adaptive in the long run. When considering the current pressures for change in the nuclear field [13] and in the maintenance work, understanding the impact of the organisational culture becomes crucial. In 2002-2003 two case studies were carried out at maintenance units of Nordic NPPs. The results showed both similarities and differences in the perceived and ideal values of the organisations. Safety and proficiency were highly valued in both plants. A common feature to both plants was also that the goals of the maintenance task were very clear at a general level; maintenance is a prerequisite for reliable production of electricity. The personnel saw their own work as highly important, even though the plants differed significantly on how the personnel saw their work contributing to the overall goals of the organisation. Nevertheless, it was found that the perceived meaningfulness of one's own work and general job satisfaction were quite high and did not differ between the plants.