Association Between Leading Indicators of Safety Performance in Construction Projects

Abstract

ABSTRACT Safety performance of the construction industry in the US has been a concern among the industry practitioners and researchers. Despite all the efforts, the number of construction workplace fatalities has increased in the last decade. Beside loss of lives, the project stakeholders suffer greatly because of the financial burden imposed as a result of occupational injuries and accidents. In order to address the problem, recent studies have turned their attention to the more proactive approaches, such as assessing workers’ perceptions of safety. The present study focused on measuring workers’ perceptions of safety on construction projects with three distinct leading indicators such as safety climate, safety control, and risk perception. The link between workplace safety performance with the aforementioned indicators has been separately examined in existing studies. This study explored the interrelationships among the indicators. Correlation analyses between the variables demonstrated a positive correlation between workers’ perceptions of safety control and safety climate. As workers’ perceptions of safety climate depend on various factors, the safety programs can target to improve those individual factors and in turn improve the overall safety climate.