Abdullah Alturki

Research interests

Research areas – Sensemaking; workgroups diversity; High Reliability Organisations

Thesis abstract – The role of sensemaking processes is evident in the studies that show how High-Reliability Organisations (HROs) can stay away from disasters while working in hard and complex situations. Sensemaking is the process through which people construct meanings and bring order into unexpected or puzzling events. Petrochemical Industry, in general, provides an HRO context. It involves very complex conditions, and yet has less than their fair share of accidents. In Saudi Arabian, petrochemical industry is a multinational industry that operates with and by many joint venture partners and reported to has a highly diverse workforce composition.

Even though theories of HROs provide useful guiding principles and concepts that describe and explain how the process of sensemaking can be facilitated in HROs, less acknowledgement has been given to the group diversity within High-Reliability Teams (HRTs) that may yield very different effects on the sensemaking process. To this concern, my research attemot to better understand the influence of diversity on reliability-seeking sensemaking processes (RSSPs) and the interplay between diversity, leadership behaviour, and organisational culture on generating this influence.

Qualifications

• MSc in Management (Texas A&M University, USA)
• BSc in Business Administration (Taibah University, Saudi Arabia)

Research groups and institutes

• Workplace Behaviour Research Centre