Abstract
Safety climate and safety performance in construction projects vary at an organization level and group level. However, the differences between supervisors and construction workers are rarely examined. This study compared the safety climate, safety behavior (safety compliance and safety participation), and safety outcomes (injuries, unsafe events, and stress) between these two social groups. The relationships among these variables were also contrasted with each other using the structural equation modeling (SEM) technique. The data were collected from 119 supervisors and 536 site workers at 22 construction projects in China. The results show that four dimensions of safety climate were distinctly different between supervisors and workers, which is consistent with the social identity theory. Two dimensions of the supervisors’ safety behavior were significantly better than those of the workers’ behavior, while supervisors suffered higher stress. The relationships between safety climate and safety behavior were positively associated for both groups. However, the links from safety climate to safety outcomes and from safety behavior to safety outcomes significantly differed between supervisors and construction workers, which revealed a complementation phenomenon. This study sheds light on group-level safety performance research. It also suggests that safety professionals should take group-targeted safety intervention measures and pay more attention to supervisors’ psychological well-being.
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Data Availability Statement
Data generated or analyzed during the study are available from the corresponding author by request.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71472139) and the International Cooperation Training Program for Graduate Students at Tongji University (Grant No. 2018XKJC-004). We sincerely appreciate the safety experts and senior engineers who provided precious advice on the questionnaire design and revision. We also genuinely thank all respondents who voluntarily participated in our investigation, including project managers, safety managers, supervisors, construction workers, and other practitioners. We especially pay gratitude to the editors and reviewers of this paper for their valuable comments.
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Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
Volume 146 • Issue 1 • January 2020
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©2019 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Oct 3, 2018
Accepted: May 9, 2019
Published online: Nov 1, 2019
Published in print: Jan 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Apr 1, 2020
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