Understanding Cultural Characteristics Shared by MCR Operators in Korean NPPs

There are various factors that affect the performance of human operators and they are called performance shaping factors (PSFs) or performance influencing factors. Many studies on diverse PSFs have been carried out, and the cultural characteristics of an operating team has been proposed as one of important factors determining team performance [1, 2]. Hofstede [3,4] defined culture as “the collective programming of the mind distinguishing the members of one group or category of people from others”. That is, people engaged in a certain domain tend to share a similar culture according to the domain-specific traits such as internal operating rules, management style, expertise, training, etc. Shin et al. [5] proposed how to identify a domain-specific cultural characteristics and confirmed its presence in the nuclear industry using Hofstede’s five cultural indices, which provided a starting point to study the effects of team culture on team performance. In addition, before scrutinizing the relationship between team culture and performance in nuclear industry, it is crucial to understand the specific cultural profile itself shared by operator groups in depth. In this regard, this study explains the cultural profile shared by operator groups in Korean nuclear power plants (NPPs), and discusses the implications of the identified cultural characteristics by each Hofstede’s index.