Department of the Built Environment, Birmingham City University, UK.
Department of the Built Environment, Birmingham City University, UK; Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of Johannesburg, South Africa.
J Safety Res. 2023 Jun;85:469-484. doi: 10.1016/j.jsr.2023.04.015. Epub 2023 May 8.
Leading indicators represent an invaluable tool that offer organizations the capability to: track health and safety performance, not just failures and accidents; measure effectiveness of safety efforts adopted; and focus on undesired precursors, rather than undesired occurred events. Despite these palpable advantages associated with their adoption, leading indicator's definition, application, and function are mostly ambiguous and inconsistent within literature. Therefore, this study systematically reviews pertinent literature to identify the constructs of leading indicators and generates guidance for leading indicator implementation (as a conceptual model).
The overarching epistemological design adopted interpretivism and critical realism philosophical stances together with inductive reasoning to analyze 80 articles retrieved from the Scopus database, plus 13 more publications supplemented by the snowballing technique. Analysis of the safety discourse within literature (as secondary data) was undertaken in two stages, namely: (1) a cross-componential analysis identified the main features of leading indicators in comparison to lagging indicators; and (2) content analysis revealed prominent constructs of leading indicators.
Analysis results identify that the definition, types, and development methods represent the main constructs for understanding the concept of leading indicators. The study identifies that ambiguity around the definition and function of leading indicators is due to the lack of differentiation of its types, namely passive leading indicators and active leading indicators.
As a practical contribution, the conceptual model, which introduces continuous learning through a perpetual loop of development and application of leading indicators, will help adopters create a knowledge repository of leading indicators and to continuously learn and improve their safety and safety performance. Specifically, the work clarifies their difference in terms of the timeframe passive leading indicators and active leading indicators take to measure different safety aspects, the functions they serve, the target they measure and their stage of development.
领先指标是一种非常有价值的工具，它使组织能够：跟踪健康和安全绩效，而不仅仅是故障和事故；衡量所采用的安全措施的有效性；并关注不期望的前因，而不是不期望的已发生事件。尽管采用领先指标具有这些明显的优势，但在文献中，它们的定义、应用和功能大多是模糊和不一致的。因此，本研究系统地回顾了相关文献，以确定领先指标的构建，并为领先指标的实施提供指导（作为概念模型）。
总体的认识论设计采用了解释主义和批判现实主义哲学立场，并结合归纳推理，分析了从 Scopus 数据库中检索到的 80 篇文章，以及通过滚雪球技术补充的 13 篇更多出版物。对文献中的安全话语（作为二次数据）进行了两个阶段的分析，即：（1）跨成分分析比较了领先指标和滞后指标的主要特征；（2）内容分析揭示了领先指标的突出结构。
分析结果表明，定义、类型和开发方法是理解领先指标概念的主要结构。研究表明，对领先指标的定义和功能的模糊性是由于缺乏对其类型（即被动领先指标和主动领先指标）的区分。
作为实际贡献，引入通过领先指标的开发和应用的持续学习的概念模型，将帮助采用者创建一个领先指标知识库，并不断学习和提高他们的安全和安全绩效。具体来说，这项工作阐明了它们在被动领先指标和主动领先指标测量不同安全方面的时间框架、它们所服务的功能、它们所测量的目标以及它们的发展阶段方面的区别。
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