Using a psychological contract of safety to predict safety climate on construction sites

Role of safety-specific transformational leadership in fostering extra-role behaviors through psychological contract fulfillment among frontline workers during COVID-19

Objectives. The emergence of COVID-19 has drastically changed the safety outlook of how the work world is viewed by leaders and followers. In this backdrop, the current study aimed at extending the safety leadership literature in the context of organizations operating in crisis situations by investigating the impact of safety-specific transformational leadership on the followers' extra-role behaviors through the mediation of psychological contract fulfillment. Methods. Using a time-lagged and multisource design, data were collected from 384 frontline rescue and healthcare workers dealing with COVID-19-related situations. Results. Results revealed that safety-specific transformational leadership behavior positively affects extra-role behaviors of frontline employees by enhancing their innovative work behavior, knowledge sharing behavior and organizational citizenship behavior. Also, psychological contract fulfillment plays a bridging role in translating the impact of safety-specific transformational leadership behavior on extra-role behaviors. Conclusion. The followers working in an unsafe context view the safety concern of their leader as a fulfillment of their unwritten expectations from their employers. Implications of these findings along with limitations and future research directions are also delineated.

Effects of a behavior-based safety observation program: Promoting safe behaviors and safety climate at work

BACKGROUND

Behavior-based safety (BBS) programs promote coworkers observing and correcting each other's at-risk behaviors on site; the idea behind BBS programs is to create a cultural shift in a company where it is acceptable for coworkers to stop anyone, at any time, from working in an unsafe manner.

OBJECTIVE

The main objective of this study is to examine the impacts of a BBS observation program in the construction industry.

METHODS

The subject, an electrical contracting company, implemented the BBS program in January 2019. This study utilized multiple data sources: the company's incident data, BBS program report data, and surveys, including the Safety Climate Assessment Tool for Small Contractors. A total of 3,891 at-risk behaviors from the BBS reports, including 600 comments, and 141 survey responses were analyzed.

RESULTS

The most frequently reported at-risk behavior was the line of fire, and the at-risk behaviors were often observed when workers conducted tasks, such as running or pulling wires, installing devices, and installing lights. The overall perception of safety climate was high, and the respondents reported that the safety climate had improved since the adoption of the BBS program. Overall, implementing the BBS program benefited in cultivating the company's collective safety climate.

CONCLUSION

As a result of the BBS program, the company implemented better communication strategies for their safety meetings on the most frequently reported at-risk behaviors, replacing safety gears with higher quality ones, and redesigning online safety training to better reflect the identified tasks that were associated with more at-risk behaviors.

Exploring the relationships among safety leadership, safety climate, psychological contract of safety, risk perception, safety compliance, and safety outcomes

Background

Recently, two types of safety compliance behaviors including deep compliance and surface compliance were differentiated. The current study aimed to investigate the relationships among safety leadership, safety climate, psychological contract of safety (PCS), risk perception, and deep compliance and surface compliance behavior of workers. In addition, the effects of both deep and surface compliance on safety outcomes were considered.

Methods

Workers' perceptions in terms of safety leadership, safety climate, PCS, risk perception, deep compliance, and surface compliance were measured by appropriate questionnaires. Three questions were asked to measure undesired safety outcomes. Structural equation modeling and correlation analysis were applied to examine the research model and relationships among variables.

Results and discussion

The results of the current study showed that deep compliance was positively predicted by safety leadership, safety climate, and PCS and negatively predicted by risk perception. Surface compliance was positively predicted by safety leadership and safety climate and negatively predicted by risk perception. Surface compliance is not significantly predicted by PCS. With regard to the adverse safety outcomes, the results showed that both deep and surface compliance were negatively associated with adverse safety outcomes, however, deep compliance had a stronger negative correlation with adverse safety outcomes than surface compliance.

Mapping the evidence on assessment of fitness to work at heights: a scoping review protocol

INTRODUCTION

Falls from height are a leading cause of serious injury and fatality globally. In South Africa, work at heights is regulated by occupational health and safety legislation, which places responsibility on employers to ensure their workers are fit for high-risk work. There is however no formal procedure or consensus on how fitness to work at heights should be assessed. This paper presents an a priori protocol for a scoping review that seeks to identify and map the current evidence base around the assessment of fitness to work at heights. It forms the initial phase of a PhD study aimed at developing an interdisciplinary consensus statement for assessing fitness to work at heights in the South African construction industry.

METHODS AND ANALYSIS

This scoping review will follow the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) scoping review framework and will be guided by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis Extension for Scoping reviews (PRISMA-ScR) checklist. An iterative search will be conducted in a selection of multidisciplinary databases including, Proquest Central, PubMed, Scopus, Science Direct, Web of Science, PsychINFO and Google Scholar. Thereafter, searches for grey literature will be performed in Google.com and websites of various national and international agencies, governing bodies and professional organisations with an interest in occupational health and work at heights. Where appropriate, targeted requests for clarification for further information will be undertaken with information sources. A descriptive qualitative content analysis of the results will be conducted and a level of evidence rating will be assigned to each study using the JBI approach. This will allow us to provide some commentary on the rigour of the existing evidence base.

ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION

Ethics approval for the PhD study was granted by the Research Ethics Committee, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Pretoria, ethics reference number, 486/2021. Results of the scoping review will be submitted to a scientific journal for publication.

TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER

This protocol is registered on the Open Science Framework at osf.io/yd5gw.

Employer safety obligations, safety climate, and safety behaviors in the ready-made garment context in Bangladesh

PURPOSE

The impact of employer safety obligations on safety climate and safety outcomes has become an important area of research in organizational and safety sciences. Evidence shows that employer safety obligations positively impact safety outcomes, including safety climate and safety behaviors. However, these relationships have not been thoroughly explored within the garment settings. This study is one of the first known studies to examine the relationships between employer safety obligations, safety climate, and safety behavior outcomes in a sample of garment employees.

METHODS

Two-wave time-lagged data were collected from 347 garment employees and their supervisors in Bangladesh. Hierarchical regression analysis was applied to examine hypothesized relationships using AMOS a SPSS.

RESULTS

Employer safety obligations positively influenced safety climate perceptions among garment employees. Safety climate perceptions are positively and significantly associated with safety behaviors, including safety compliance behaviors, prosocial safety behaviors, and proactive safety behaviors. Moreover, the safety climate mediates the influence of employer safety obligations on safety behaviors.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings provide important evidence of the relationships between employer safety obligations, safety climate, and safety behaviors in the garment industry of Bangladesh.

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

Ultimately, these findings guide the government, garment manufacturers, and managers to bolster garment employees' safety outcomes.

A model for establishing resilience safety culture For construction industry

Increasing construction injury and fatality rate implies that conventional safety culture is unable to match the increasing requirement of construction industry safety. One of the promising approaches is establishing resilience safety culture for construction industry. For the aim, a hypothesized model was developed and 420 data for testing model was collected by the present study. Structural Equation Modeling technique was employed to test the hypothesized model by fitting the data into the model. Finally, a model consisting of ten dimensions with thirteen relationships was established by the present study. Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process was employed to make a comparison between the proposed model and the other two prevalent models. It was concluded that the proposed model performs better in complying with real situations and considering sufficiently necessary dimensions and relationships. While it is a bit of hard to be easily and fully understood, which points out the direction of further work.

The Relationship Between Leadership Safety Commitment and Resilience Safety Participation Behavior

Purpose

To analyze the impact of leadership safety commitment on miners’ safety participation behavior and to explore the mediating effect of miners’ psychological safety and the moderating effect of perceived supervisor safety attitude (PSSA) and perceived coworker safety attitude (PCSA).

Methods

A total of 1446 valid questionnaires were collected from miners working in state-owned mines in China from August to October 2019. A variety of scales were used to measure the variables, including “Our management has strict requirements for safe work when working backward”, “I made mistakes in the team, and other coworkers often have opinions about me”, “I will be regarded as a troublemaker if I raise safety issues”, “When we complete work safely, the supervisor is satisfied”, “My coworkers sometimes ignore safety rules”.

Results

Leadership safety commitment has a significant positive effect on miners’ safety participation behavior; psychological safety of miners partially mediates the relationship between leadership safety commitment and the safety participation behavior of miners; and PSSA and PCSA moderate the intermediary effect of miners’ psychological safety on leadership safety commitment and miners’ safety participation behavior. When PSSA or PCSA is positive, the mediating effect of psychological safety is stronger.

Conclusion

This paper analyzes miners’ safety participation behavior from the perspective of resilience and discusses the impact of leadership safety commitment on miners’ safety participation behavior. These offer theoretical guidance and inspiration for the management of organizations to enhance the positive effects of workplace leadership safety commitment and improve miners’ safety participation behavior.

The Impact of Job Burnout on Employees' Safety Behavior Against the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Mediating Role of Psychological Contract

Employee safety behavior is critical for occupational health in work environments threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, the widespread and increasingly serious job burnout of employees is a complex and difficult problem for enterprises to handle during any epidemic. Therefore, it is helpful to identify and discuss job burnout and other main psychological factors that affect safety behavior to find appropriate solutions. Using the PLS-SEM method, the study explored the relationship between job burnout and safety behavior against the epidemic, as well as the mediating role of psychological contract. According to the local guidelines for controlling COVID-19, this study revised the safety behavior scale. Data were collected by structured questionnaires in May to July 2020 from Chinese employees (N = 353) who resumed their work after the outbreak of the pandemic. The findings confirmed that job burnout has a negative impact on safety behavior, and psychological contract play a partial mediating role in mitigating the negative impact. Specifically, the transaction dimension and relationship dimension of psychological contract negatively affected safety behavior while the development dimension of the psychological contract was not directly related to safety behavior. It is suggested that enterprises should take effective measures to reduce employees' job burnout and implement flexible psychological contract management and intervention, so as to effectively improve the performance of work safety behavior. Based on the multidimensional model, the findings of this study shed light on promoting safety behavior to prevent the spread of epidemics.

Research on the relationship between enterprise safety production management mode and employees' safety behavior based on social cognition and behavior incentive theory

AbstractThe realization of high-performance production safety needs not only a scientific and reasonable production safety management mode, but also active participation of employees with safety initiative (SI). Based on Social Cognition Theory and Behavior Motivation Theory, the study establishes a research model of the production safety management mode and safety behavior. Based on the survey data of 467 employees from 91 enterprises, and the Structural Equation Model is used for empirical verification. The findings show that three safety production management modes of punishment, regulation and guidance will affect the level of employees' SI, and then affect safety behavior. SI acts as an intermediary variable between safety production management mode and safety behavior. The transformation of enterprise safety production management mode from punishment to regulation, and then to guidance is conducive to encouraging employees to implement initiative safety behavior (ISB), reducing passive safety behavior (PSB), and improving enterprise safety management performance.

The acceptance of personal protective equipment among Hong Kong construction workers: An integration of technology acceptance model and theory of planned behavior with risk perception and safety climate

INTRODUCTION

The phenomenon that construction workers do not use personal protective equipment (PPE) is a major reason for the high occurrence frequency of accidents in the construction industry. However, little efforts have been made to quantitatively examine the factors influencing construction workers' acceptance of PPE.

METHOD

In the current study, a PPE acceptance model for construction workers (PAMCW) was proposed to address the noted need. The PAMCW incorporates the technology acceptance model, theory of planned behavior, risk perception, and safety climate for explaining construction worker acceptance of PPE. 413 construction workers participated in this study to fill out a structured questionnaire. The PAMCW was analyzed using structural equation modeling.

RESULTS

Results provide evidence of the applicability of the technology acceptance model and theory of planned behavior to the PPE acceptance among construction workers. The positive influence of safety climate and risk perception-severity on attitude toward using PPE was significant. Safety climate positively influences perceived usefulness. Risk perception-worry and unsafe was found to positively affect intention to use PPE. Practical Applications: Practical suggestions for increasing construction workers' use of PPE are also discussed.

Measuring Safety Climate in the Construction Industry: A Systematic Literature Review

Recent studies on safety in various fields use the concept of safety climate to explain the causes of safety accidents. Many studies attempt to measure the safety climates and identify the causes for accidents in the high-risk construction industry. Studies have shown that the higher the level of the safety climate, the lower the accident rate at construction sites. Methods of measuring safety climate, including the NOSACQ-50 survey, have been presented. Studies on the methodology of measuring safety climate should be continued to improve reliability and precision. Although many studies have been conducted to measure safety climate, such as questionnaires, regression analysis, and suggestions for safety climate measurement methods, there are few studies on a systematic literature review of them. This requires a systematic literature review (SLR) of the studies conducted so far. This study conducted an SLR on the definition and measurement methods of safety climate in the construction industry published since 2000, when safety climate’s impact on accidents began to be established. This review study utilized the PRISMA method, analyzed 735 studies, and selected 57 papers finally. SLR was carried out for selected research works, and the results were summarized. There are three methods to measure safety climate: literature survey, questionnaire, and data analysis. Factor analysis, development of measuring model, development of questionnaire, statistical analysis, and machine learning were investigated as their sub-methods. This study’s results can be used as fundamental sources for improving existing methods and developing new methods of measuring safety climate in the construction industry.

Perceptions of Safety Climate in Construction Projects between Workers and Managers/Supervisors in the Developing Country of Iran

What are the different perceptions on safety climate (SC) by workers and managers/supervisors engaged in the construction industry of developing countries? Reconciling these two differing views is pivotal for mitigating and avoiding both the injured and fatal accidents in the construction industry, especially in those developing countries where safety conditions are poor and unpredictable, and safety measures are inadequate in most cases. To answer this research question, the collective perceptions of 118 construction workers and 123 managers/supervisors on the SC in construction projects in Iran were gleaned and investigated. In particular, these perceptions were initially collected by two different empirical surveys validated by a sample of university professors and construction managers and then analyzed through the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) test and Bartlett’s test of sphericity under factor analysis, together with a one-sample t-test. Results indicated that “workers’ attitudes and perceptions”, “safety knowledge and training”, “working relationships and roles of colleagues”, and “workers’ risk perceptions” are important categories of SC factors perceived by construction workers, whereas “safety rules and management practices” is the essential category of SC factors discerned by managers/supervisors. The difference in perceptions between workers and managers/supervisors is considered to be beneficial for an overall understanding of SC in general and for developing countries in particular. Moreover, a series of effective suggestions for improving SC in the construction industry of developing countries are provided with reference to each category. The views of SC factors are reinforced as a social process combining the synergies of workers and managers/supervisors, as well as proper safety training to be pushed forward as an essential activity that should be incorporated in human resources development of construction organizations so as to improve the existing level of SC, leading to fewer accidents at the industry level.

Investigation of Multi-level Safety Culture in the Indian Construction Industry: A Multi-level Employees' Perception Based Approach

Inadequate compliance with safety practices is a major hurdle in the construction industry, and a single-level source of input to assess safety culture is a major limitation of the literature. Therefore, this study aimed to capture multi-level employees' (top management (TM), middle management (MM), and workers) perceptions to assess multi-level safety culture (organization level (OL), project level (PL), and personnel level (PPL)) in the construction industry. This study considered Indian construction industry a study area and used a questionnaire survey and interview technique as research instruments. 184 responses were collected from multi-level employees. Data analysis was performed using descriptive statistical method and hypothesis testing using the Mann-Whitney U test followed by the Kruskal-Wallis and Post Hoc test. Findings highlighted inadequate safety compliances and significant (p < 0.05) perception differences among multi-level employees. Further, root cause analysis for observed perception differences was performed, and managerial implications were discussed from implementation perspectives.

An analysis of occupational accidents involving national and international construction workers in Spain using the association rule technique

Worker safety awareness on construction sites is a major concern due to the hazardous work conditions. Additionally, globalization is increasing the cultural diversity of the workforce and this influences workers' attitudes, beliefs and behaviour. The growing number of migrant workers in this sector has become a distinctive feature of the industry's labour market. The objective of this article is to analyse occupational accidents that occurred on Spanish construction sites while taking into consideration the nationality of the workers. Due to the large number of accidents and attributes associated with them, the use of association rules is proposed. Overall, results evince similar behaviour, although interesting differences can be observed regarding the occupation of workers. In addition, the results are in accordance with previous studies carried out in other countries. The analysis of these accidents will serve to establish initiatives that provide safer work environments.

Determinants for Safety Climate Evaluation of Construction Industry Sites in Saudi Arabia

The hazardous nature of the construction industry requires giving increasing attention to safety management and the available means to eliminate or reduce the risks of workers' injuries. Workers in the construction industry of Saudi Arabia face similar daily risks as workers face in other countries. The safety climate significantly influences safety performance, making research in the field of safety climate a vital step toward raising safety levels at construction sites. This study aims at exploring key components of determinants for safety climate evaluation of Saudi Arabian construction sites. Using data collected from 401 industry practitioners, a dimension reduction statistical approach and exploratory factor/principal component analysis were conducted on 13 safety climate factors that were found to significantly correlate with safety climate evaluation of construction sites. The study revealed three key components of determinants for safety climate evaluation of Saudi Arabian construction sites. Notable components are safety commitment, safety interaction, and safety support. Implications of this study include assisting construction industry stakeholders to bolster the safety climate at their construction sites, which should lead to improved safety performance levels.

Safety Climate Perceptions in the Construction Industry of Saudi Arabia: The Current Situation

Workers’ wellbeing and safety is important in the construction industry due to the high risk of accidents. Safety climate development is a positive initial step toward raising the safety levels of construction practitioners. This study aims at revealing the factors influencing safety climate perceptions in the construction industry of Saudi Arabia. A set of extracted factors from the literature was validated and used to design a comprehensive questionnaire survey. Data was collected from 401 personnel working on 3 large construction project sites in Saudi Arabia. Descriptive statistics and the crosstabulation algorithm, Kendall’s tau-b correlation test, were used to analyze the data. The study revealed a set of 13 factors influencing safety climate perceptions, which are: Supervision, guidance and inspection, appraisal of risks and hazards, social security and health insurance, workmate influences, management safety justice, management commitment to safety, education and training, communication, workers’ safety commitment, workers’ attitude toward health and safety, workers’ involvement, supportive environment, and competence. The results also indicate the significant and anticipated role of top management in safety climate at sites. Implications of this study include assisting construction industry stakeholders to better understand and enhance safety climate, which in turn will lead to improved safety behavior, culture, motivation, and performance.

Safety climate: Systematic literature network analysis of 38 years (1980-2018) of research

The objective of this paper is to examine the safety climate knowledge epistemology using bibliometric and systematic literature network analysis. For this purpose, bibliometric information of research article published on safety climate topic was retrieved from Scopus databases. In total, 494 articles published between 1980 and 2018 were retrieved. These articles cover 1373 authors, 203 journals and 2511 keywords. Information collected was analyzed employing bibliometric and network analysis approach using an open source computer program R and VOSviewer. The main findings of the study reveal the publication trends in safety climate literature since 1980 to present, identifies most productive authors, and most influential research work. Our findings suggest that Huang and Zohar are the top publishing authors in safety climate domain. Zohar's work has the highest citations. The most influential articles have been published in Journals such as Accident Analysis and Prevention, Journal of Applied Psychology, Safety Science and Journal of Safety Research. Network analysis of these articles yielded co-citation networks of most influential works, bibliographical coupling network and keywords co-occurrence network yielded the structure of safety climate knowledge. Findings of our research have theoretical and practical implications in the area of safety climate.

How do organizational practices relate to perceived system safety effectiveness? Perceptions of safety climate and co-worker commitment to safety as workplace safety signals

INTRODUCTION

Integrating safety climate research with signaling theory, we propose that individual perceptions of safety climate signal the importance of safety in the organization. Specifically, we expect that three work-related organizational practices (training effectiveness, procedure effectiveness, and work pressure) relate to the broader risk control system in the workplace via individual perceptions of safety climate as a broad management signal. Further, we expect this broad management signal interacts with a local environmental signal (co-worker commitment to safety) to amplify or diminish perceived system safety effectiveness.

METHOD

In a field study of oil and gas workers (N = 219; Study 1), we used mediation modeling to determine the relationships between work-related organizational practices, perceived safety climate, and perceived safety system effectiveness. In a field study of railway construction workers (N = 131; Study 2), we used moderated mediation modeling to explore the conditional role of co-worker commitment to safety.

RESULTS

We found that training effectiveness, procedure effectiveness, and work pressure predicted perceived system safety effectiveness indirectly via perceived safety climate (Studies 1 and 2) and that these indirect paths are influenced by co-worker commitment to safety (Study 2).

CONCLUSIONS

Findings suggest that perceived safety climate is driven in part by work practices, and that perceived safety climate (from managers) and co-worker commitment to safety (from the local environment) interact to shape workplace safety system effectiveness. Practical applications: The insight that training, procedures, and work pressure are meaningful predictors of perceived safety climate as a signal suggests that organizations should be cognizant of the quality of work-related practices for safety. The insight we offer on the competing versus complimentary nature of managerial safety signals (perceived safety climate) and co-worker safety signals (co-worker commitment to safety) could also be used by safety personnel to develop safety interventions directed in both areas.

Mind the Gap: Professionalization is the Key to Strengthening Safety and Leadership in the Construction Sector

The aim of this paper is to analyze the reality of risk prevention in construction sector companies in Spain, from the perspective of training, management, and risk prevention, as well as the amount of resources that are allocated to those budget headings. An in-depth comparative review has been conducted, using the data obtained from two focus groups that were expressly created for the study, in conjunction with the Second European Survey of Enterprises on New and Emergent Risks (ESENER-2) and its Spanish counterpart (ESENER-2 Spain). The focus groups were formed with agents and entrepreneurs involved in the construction sector, from both the public and the private sector, in order to provide greater impartiality to the resulting data. The principal strategic indicators that served as a guideline for the moderators of the different focus groups were analyzed. The results obtained show great similarity between the data from the focus groups and the data from ESENER-2 and ESENER-2 Spain; which demonstrates the idiosyncrasies that surround this productive sector in the European setting, so badly treated by the economic crisis. All of these points highlight the imperative need to professionalize the construction sector, implementing a “risk prevention culture” among all of the agents involved in the constructive-preventive processes that surround construction activities.