Production, Safety and Teamwork in a Deep-Level Mining Workplace

In almost any industry, the day-to-day lived experiences of workers directly shape production processes. Those experiences are of fundamental importance to a range of managerial concerns including organisational behaviour and human resource management, organisational safety and risk management, production systems, work relations and change management. Yet they are too often overlooked by the executives and managers who design management strategies.

In this book, Sizwe Phakathi addresses such issues head-on, providing insights into the underlying social, human, managerial and organisational processes that shape workers’ orientations towards reorganisation of work, production, safety, teamwork and work relations. Through an in-depth study of a deep-level mining workplace, Phakathi brings to the fore the realities of how work processes shape the actions of frontline teams, production supervisors and managers. He points out how these realities trigger the informal work practice of making a plan, which is an indispensable organisational tactic for production, safety, teamwork and work relations in the mining workplace. In the process, he highlights frontline miners’ perspectives of managing, balancing and coping with the competing demands of physically challenging work, production, safety and team dynamics while at the rock-face.

This book will help practitioners, policy-makers and researchers to understand the factors influencing work processes, production, safety, teamwork and work relations – not only in a mining workplace but more generally as well. The insights it provides into the importance of day-to-day lived working experiences will help them to improve organisational, employee and team performance.

Author Biography

Dr Sizwe Timothy Phakathi (PhD Oxford) is Head of Safety and Sustainable
Development at the Chamber of Mines of South Africa and an Employer Convenor at
the Mine Health and Safety Council of South Africa. He is a Research Associate
at the University of Pretoria’s Gordon Institute of Business Science and in the
Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. Dr Phakathi is an
alumnus of the Emerging Leaders in African Mining Programme coordinated by the
Minerals and Energy for Development Alliance at the University of Western
Australia and University of Queensland.