Comparison of Safety Cultures and Performances between the Construction Industries in the United States and Canada: A Case Study of Texas and Ontario

The increasing globalization of the construction industry has produced new challenges on safety since more construction supervisors and workers will transit to different regions or countries for work. It is important to ensure they understand the local work culture and regulations to avoid safety accidents. Considering this, investigating safety culture and performance in different locales can facilitate understanding across jurisdictions. In this paper, data were collected in the province of Ontario in Canada and the state of Texas in the USA to compare several dimensions of safety culture and performance and to uncover their shared and distinct characteristics. Four safety culture factors were found to be significantly different. For safety performance, differences were observed in the number of reported physical injuries and unsafe events while psychological stress symptoms were similar in both regions. It is also found that safety culture factors may influence safety performance differently between the regions. The findings of this paper provide insight into safety cultures in Ontario and Texas, and valuable guidance to global construction companies for designing safety training programs aimed at international workers. This study facilitates future research on global safety benchmarking and learning with sound evidence.