The Components of Psychological Safety of Oil and Gas Shift Workers in the Arctic

The chapter focuses on justification of the psychological safety model of oil and gas workers in the Arctic. The safety in industrial activity depends firstly not only on the employee, on his attitude toward observance of occupational safety and health regulations, but also on the personal attributes of the specialist, his subjective perceptions and effectiveness of his psychological self-regulation. The study was conducted at an oil and gas facility with a watch-based method of labor organization in the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation (duration of a rotation shift is 30 days). The study involved 70 persons at the ages from 24 to 60 years (average age 38.7 +/- 1.3). The methods were as follows: study of documentation, monitoring of work process, questionnaires, psycho-physiological and psychological testing, and statistical methods of data analysis. The study verified the concept of psychological safety as a mental state of a subject who has control over a set of internal and external factors of the ergatic system providing updating of internal resources of the individual for efficient professional activity on the psycho-physiological and psychological levels. As a result, the model of psychological security of oil and gas workers in the Arctic was introduced and evidence based. It includes the following components: (1) The psycho-physiological level of functional status (reduced or optimal); (2) The psychological level of functional state (emergency or economical); (3) The image of the labor object (low undifferentiated hazard assessment or high differentiated hazard assessment); (4) The perception of the subject (high undifferentiated or moderately high differentiated self-assessment); (5) The perception of the subject-object and subject-subject relations (neutral, negative, or positive). In this research, the components of psychological safety of oil and gas workers of different professional groups (operators of oil and gas, boiler operators, drivers, engineers and technical workers, maintenance specialists) in the Arctic were empirically studied and characterized. The psychological level of functional state was expressed in economical adaptive strategy mainly on the basis of results gained from the study of operators of treatment facilities and boiler houses, engineering and technical staff and maintenance staff. On the contrary, the emergency strategy was defined in the course of the study of oil and gas operators. Low psycho-physiological levels of functional states were noted among drivers and operators of treatment facilities and boiler houses. Higher rates of this component of psychological safety were found among engineering and technical personnel, oil and gas operators, as well as maintenance specialists. Among the components of psychological safety related to the mental structure of the regulation, there are no strong differences between workers belonging to one group or another, depending on job. In all occupational groups there is a predominance of a higher and more differentiated assessment of the impact of adverse factors and potential hazards during the rotation shift and moderately high self-assessments of competence. However, the composition of the subject-object and subject-subject relations shows a predominantly negative evaluation of socio-psychological environment mostly among drivers, in other groups of specialists the attitude was neutral or positive.