Task Accomplishment in an Air Force Maintenance Environment

摘要

This research investigated the impact of environmental (in the organizational sense) distractions, and the resulting coping behaviors, on maintenance performance. Prior research focused on investigating performance out of context, that is, in controlled environments. Maintenance personnel must not only achieve technical task completion, they must also contend with an environment that provides many distractions that may impede that task performance. This investigator spent one week at three different bases, one MAC, one SAC, and one TAC. He spent 107 hours observing eight different crew chiefs and nine different specialists. Because the study was designed as exploratory research the methodology precludes generalizing the results to the Air Force maintenance population. However, the methodological and conceptual problems encountered in the exploratory research are resolvable and a viable research plan to conduct a representative study is presented. The phenomenological data support the original concept and suggest that the relationship between performance and contextual variables is even more important to productivity than originally assumed. Those maintenance people observed spent fifty percent, or better, of their maintenance shift coping with environmental distractions that for the most part hindered task accomplishment. At the same time, study results suggest that there are multiple Air Force maintenance environments, rather than a monolithic maintenance environment, but the maintenance system assumes a monolithic environment.