MEASURING SAFETY CLIMATE TO ENHANCE SAFETY CULTURE IN THE CONSTRUCTION INDUSTRY OF PAKISTAN

Abstract

Poor safety performance has been attributed to most construction industries (due to hazardous conditions) of developing countries and Pakistan is not the exceptional with intensive human work force. In the absence of any legislative administration body for occupational health and safety, the lagging indicator for safety performance i.e. safety records is inadequate and create a space for leading indicator i.e. safety climate. Safety climate as pivotal construct of safety culture shared common grounds as beliefs, values, attitudes etc. for safety. The clear and positive perception about safety leads the positive safety climate to enhance safety culture in turn. The objective of this study is to assess the direction in safety management through determination of safety climate that would enhance safety culture and positively impact perceived safety performance on construction sites. Working groups (manager, supervisor and workers) based on organizational structure exhibit sub-cultures which create barriers for common safety climate. This study also investigates the multi-level safety climate with two main streams as Within Group Consensus and Between Group Differences. The impact of demographic factors, project type and company category on safety climate has also been investigated. A safety climate questionnaire has been surveyed (self interviewed and post mail) among 21 construction companies on 36 construction projects and response rate was excellent (83.33%). Collected data was analyzed by SPSS 17.0 by means of factor analysis; eight safety climate factors were extracted, accounting for 57.205% of the total variance. Multiple regression analysis revealed two significant factors “management dedication” and “employees’ involvement” portraying workers’ perceptions of safety performance. In stance to assess multi level safety climates, evaluate aspects of agreement within groups by degree of cohesiveness (rwg(j) ≥ 0.75) and differences among groups by one way ANOVA (sig. value < 0.05), relationships developed between differences by Bi-variant analysis (sig. value < 0.05, 0.01). The results indicate that managers are capable of identify hazards, consider safety as prime priority, and accident reporting is important. Supervisors perceived that managers’ role for implementation of safety is important. Workers perceived that they are capable of identification of hazards. Differences between groups were: workers’ suggestions were not considered by managers; managers do not involve workers for developing and reviewing of safety procedures, instructions and rules; workers have opinions that people are just unlucky to suffer an accident but supervisors opposed; managers confirmed that every accident or near miss occurred on site is reported but workers revealed that every accident or near miss is not reported. Differences between working groups were further investigated for correlation through bi-variant correlation analysis. Workers’ participation showed a strong, positive relationship with workers’ engagement and accident reporting. Workers’ engagement showed a strong, positive relationship with accident reporting. No significant relationship was found for workers’ bad luck to be suffered from accident to other differences. A construction safety climate model is given that enact safety performance model and multi-level safety climate with strength and conflicting factors to enhance the significance of shared perception of employees to develop positive safety culture. This study indicates that high efforts of management needs to involve workers for safety related activities which helps for effective safety management system implementation and each employee to acquire safety knowledge which would develop capability for safe operation on construction sites. Finally, this work provides useful information for project managers and practitioners who desire to improve safety performance on construction sites.