Journal of Construction Engineering and Management

Distractions theory and general practice have suggested that providing safe physical conditions will reduce task demands and thereby increase workers’ ability to develop highly productive and safe production systems. However, the construction industry has not achieved greater productivity and safety gains despite extensive safety efforts. This study aimed to examine whether the reduced task-demands as a result of safer conditions actually causes fall risks to be underestimated, encourages increased productivity, and changes risk-taking behaviors. To do so, the changes in study participants’ productivity, risk perception (through physiological and subjective measures), risk-taking behavior (through tracking subject’s motion, and localizing their positions and postures), and safety performance (through frequency of near misses) were examined when they were provided with various levels of safety interventions. The findings indicated that the reduced perceived risk and the desire for increased productivity may skew risk analysis and strongly bias workers toward presuming invulnerability when safety interventions are in place. Known as risk compensation cognitive bias, this change in human behavior counteracts the traditional outcomes explained by Hinze’s distractions theory. The empirical evidence from a simulated roofing task helped substantiate the proposed productivity-safety model, which illustrates how safety interventions might become counterproductive because of the risk-compensation bias experienced by workers.

Construction companies are often notorious for high employee turnover and antisocial behavior. In a hazardous work environment, arduous scheduling tasks, unethical supervision, and working with multiple team members put higher stress on employees to reflect antisocial behavior and lead to turnover intention. Therefore, this article attempts to investigate the association between ethical leadership and turnover intention and antisocial behavior through trust in the leader and procedural justice in the construction industry. From the perspective of resource conservation theory, this article assumes that the moderating influence of job embeddedness plays a role in the association between mediators (trust in leaders and procedural justice) and outcome variables (turnover intention and antisocial behavior). This article uses data collected from 275 employees of Hong Kong construction companies. The results indicated a negative association between ethical leadership and employee turnover intention in the construction industry. The results revealed that job embeddedness moderated the link between trust in leader and turnover intention, and the link between procedural justice and turnover intention. Moreover, the influence of job embeddedness was found nonsignificant in the case of antisocial behavior. This article provides useful insights for policy and decision-making authorities, especially site managers, on how ethical leadership can retain employees by strengthening trust and procedural justice in construction companies.

Selection of the most appropriate contractor is critical for a successful project. There has been no practical analytic model for objective determination of the most appropriate contractor selection method (CSM) before the tendering evaluation. Most existing models adopt the posttendering bidding data for a specific procurement project rather than those from all potential bidders who may enter the procurement market. To resolve the long-unsolved problem of the existing models, this paper proposes a pretendering contractor selection analysis model (PreCSAM) based on historical procurement data, which can determine the most appropriate of the three prevailing contractor selection methods, e.g., lowest tender (LT), best value (BV), and prequalified lowest tender (PQLT). The three-stage model validation of the proposed method revealed that the proposed PreCSAM is able to suggest a CSM with 100% correctness compared with those reported in literature; it also achieved a high precision rate (94.12%) of market range prediction for a retrospective analysis of 23 public building construction projects from 2012 to 2018 procurements by the Construction and Planning Agency of the Ministry of Interior, Taiwan. Most importantly, the proposed PreCSAM overcomes the limitations of posttendering analysis of all existing methods in determining CSM.

Project-based architecture, engineering, and construction (A/E/C) firms’ survival depends largely on their market development performance. Given the knowledge-intensive nature of their offerings, A/E/C firms that can develop and leverage their knowledge bases are likely to enjoy superior market positions. Based on empirical data collected from 108 A/E/C firms in Vietnam, this study investigated the effect of A/E/C firms’ knowledge-management capability (KMC) on their market development performance, and the moderating role of firm size in this relationship. The results revealed that A/E/C firms’ KMC positively affects their market development performance, and this positive effect is stronger in small/medium-sized A/E/C firms than in large firms. These findings provide empirical evidence for small/medium-sized A/E/C firms to invest in their knowledge-management infrastructure (e.g., organizational values/norms, policies/procedures, employee development, and information infrastructure) and processes (e.g., socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization) to secure superior market positions. Theoretically, this research broadens and deepens understanding of the link between KMC and organizational performance (i.e., market development performance) and the contingent contextual factors (i.e., firm size) in the project-based construction industry.

In the past decade, the architecture, engineering, and construction industry has witnessed increasing growth in the green building market and continues to expect a promising future. Although companies in the industry have played a significant role in developing the green building market, scarce studies have analyzed changes in the market from the perspectives of these corporations. Also, few studies classify green building companies by characteristics. To fill these gaps of knowledge, we explored the characteristics of the US green building market from a corporate perspective, specifically investigating green contractors and design firms. We first collected data of 464 top US green building companies identified by the Engineering News-Record over the past decade and explored the development trend of the green building market, based on the green revenue generated by these companies. We found that the general growth trend in the US green building market in the past decade could be divided into three stages: a rapid-growth stage (2000–2008), a steady-growth stage (2009–2013), and a maturity and transformation stage (2014–2016). We then categorized the 464 organizations into three groups with distinct characteristics by $k$-means cluster analysis techniques, including mature green building companies, sector-oriented green building companies, and primary-stage green building companies. This study provides the academic and practitioner communities with a holistic understanding of the development of the US green building market from the view of burgeoning companies. Corporate-level management systems and sustainable practices of the three clusters of green building companies also provide guidance for construction companies in the various stages of transformation towards sustainability to adopt different strategies.

The focus of this study is the applicability of the Last Planner System (LPS) to modular offshore wind construction. Following a design science approach, a conceptual model for LPS adapted to modular offshore wind construction was developed, then refined and evaluated in a field study. The field study investigated was an offshore wind project in the Belgian part of the North Sea. Theoretical knowledge from academics as well as practical experience from field experts allowed adjusting LPS to the context of modular offshore wind construction. The case study organization participated in artifact development and evaluated its utility through implementation. Implementation of the developed artifact reduced the project duration by 21% compared to the as-planned original critical path method (CPM) schedule. Because offshore wind projects have tended to substantially overrun their scheduled durations, 21% may understate the actual improvement. Compared to current installation time within the industry, the project made a 36% reduction, measured by average installation time per megawatt. The developed LPS artifact contributes to the body of knowledge by adaptation of LPS to modular construction, and the evaluation shows its usefulness in the context of modular offshore wind construction.

Civil engineers recognize the need to better address the potential consequences of infrastructure systems on social equity. However, the challenge has been translating social equity concerns into metrics that are usable in engineering analyses. In this case study, the authors aim to identify such metrics that can be subsequently used by engineers who seek to make equity-informed infrastructure construction, replacement, and rehabilitation decisions. Combining geospatial and statistical techniques on publicly available data sources, this research proposes a quantitative framework for how to incorporate social equity metrics into infrastructure analyses. The feasibility of this framework is analyzed in the case of Pennsylvania’s bridge system. This feasibility study finds that selection effects (i.e., factors that drive bridge siting) are stronger than treatment effects (i.e., changes that occur after bridge construction) of bridges on social equity. Consistent variables are also identified as correlated with such effects (e.g., demographic and, to a lesser degree, family variables). Overall, this research proposes measures and an approach that helps local government transportation agencies better incorporate social equity into infrastructure construction, replacement and rehabilitation.