Predicting Impact of Maintenance Resource Management Training Utilizing Individual Difference Variables

Human error has been identified as a leading cause of accidents and incidents in many "high-consequence" industries, such as aviation and medicine. These industries have evolved widespread employee training programs to prevent such errors or to mitigate their impact on the public. In addition, common perceptions exist in these industries regarding the role of age, employee tenure, and type of position held in an employee's responsiveness to such training. This study was conducted to identify the predictive role individual difference variables may play in the impact of maintenance resource management training programs in an aviation maintenance setting. Using multiple regression analyses, the study identifies common misperceptions in the industry regarding the effect of these variables on employees' responses to training. The pervasiveness and complexity of organizational training continues to increase as organizations strive to maintain their human capital and competitive edge, and deal with an aging, changing workforce demographic (Salas & Cannon-Bowers, 2001 ). In a general sense, training is intended to change the current state of organizational members, either through increasing information awareness or requesting members perform new behaviors or develop new skills. Organizational training relies on a fundamental assumption: that participating in it will cause change. In the aviation industry, one critical aspect of successful performance is safety the avoidance of accidents and incidents and the promotion ofbehaviors and organizational norms considered 'safe'. While safety may be a concern in many organizations, aviation is considered a "high-consequence industry'' (as are fields such as medicine or nuclear energy); that is, an industry in which the consequences of poor performance are potentially significant, such as deaths ofboth employees and customers, damage to multi-million dollar equipment, federal JAAER, Spring 2013 investigations and punishments, etc (Bowen & BigdaPeyton, 2011). The high-consequence nature of these types of organizations means that they are heavily invested in identifying and appropriately measuring factors that may affect safety performance. Human factors are one area that has received increased scrutiny in recent years for its potential impact on aviation safety. Following several highly-publicized major accidents directly attributed to human error (FAA, 1990), the last 20 years have seen significant growth in the implementation of human factors training programs in a variety of high-consequence industries (Bowen, Sabin, & Patankar, 2011; Bowen & Bigda-Peyton, 2011 ). A growing focus on the role ofhuman factors in aviation incidents and accidents and the growth of a systems-based approach to the aviation organization has led to the development of several human factors training programs. Crew Resource Management (CRM) training for flight crews developed in the 1980s (Taylor & Patankar, 2001), while more recently Maintenance Resource Management (MRM) training has been developed for aviation maintenance workers.