An explorative study of antecedents of organizational mindfulness in emergency room

Abstract

Emergency Room (ER) can be considered as a High Reliability Organization expected to guarantee reliability despite facing hectic and unpredictable events. To achieve this status, ER should invest on the management style of Organizational Mindfulness, focused on anticipation and containment of errors. The aim of this exploratory research was to investigate how Organizational Mindfulness occurs in Italian ERs and what is the role of Safety Culture and Work Engagement in predicting Organizational Mindfulness measured with an ad hoc questionnaire. Results show how the communal sphere of Safety Culture seems a better predictor of Organizational Mindfulness than the individual sphere of Work Engagement.

Keywords

• Emergency room
• Organizational mindfulness
• Safety culture
• Work engagement
• High reliability organization.