Professional Ethnocentrism and Ethical Risk Management Efficacy: How Engineers' Emotional Openness Mediates this Complex Relationship

Professional ethnocentrism is an important issue in developing an ethical approach to risk management in engineering. It may impede engineers from acknowledging and valuing the plurality of legitimate perspectives in risk management, which usually challenge their technical point of view. It is therefore crucial to understand what may influence such ethnocentrism. In this study, 178 professional engineers were asked to rate their agreement on several statements regarding professional ethnocentrism and emotions. In the same questionnaire, they also rated their confidence in their ability to carry out specific tasks promoting an ethical approach to risk management. Our results suggest that engineers with higher ethical risk management efficacy are less subject to professional ethnocentrism, and that this relationship is fully mediated by emotional openness. Therefore, we argue that engineering education should promote emotional reflection, as developing this skill could help engineers to transcend their technical perspective on risk. Engineers who are more sensitive to the complex and ethical dimensions of safety will be more likely to take an interdisciplinary and deliberative approach to risk management. To further this aim, we argue, professional training should specifically aim at enhancing engineers’ self-efficacy in ethical risk management.