Safety Leadership Effectiveness Assessment of Project Managers in the Construction Industry: A Case Study of China

Leadership is proven as a key factor impacting safety while researchers and practitioners are fostering proactive approaches to preventing workplace injuries. Currently, safety leadership and its impact on safety performance is gaining importance within the construction management academia. However, it is still a crucial yet unsettled research issue that how to be an effective safety leader in the construction industry, and how to assess leadership effectiveness. Safety leadership effectiveness is highly context-dependent, requiring researchers and practitioners to fully consider the characteristics of the construction industry and project-based organizations when assessing and improving safety leadership. Based on an empirical study, this paper aims to propose safety leadership effectiveness assessment criteria, which consists of several key effectiveness indicators of safety leadership for both project owners and contractors. A preliminary indicator system was extracted from the current literature. A questionnaire survey was designed to further identify key indicators, and a total of eleven construction projects were involved. By using a fuzzy statistical analysis method, this study determined five key effectiveness indicators for owner safety leadership and six key indicators for contractor safety leadership. This paper contributes to the current leadership research by proposing the assessment method and an indicator system for safety leadership effectiveness in the construction industry, thus serving as important tools for safety leadership benchmarking between different enterprises and projects. The method and indicators can help construction practitioners determine whether their measures and actions will take effects when they plan to improve safety leadership of project management teams. Conclusions also give insights into the major criteria against which project managers of owners or contractors should behave as effective safety leaders, in order to improve safety performance of construction projects.