Australian construction supervisors’ response to occupational health and safety

Abstract

A survey of Australian construction workers was conducted within three different organisations. The purpose of the survey was to determine whether members of workgroups within the construction industry develop unique and group-specific safety climates. The existence of group safety climate was ascertained by the degree of consensus between members of the same workgroup about their supervisors’ response to safety within the organisation and the extent to which these perceptions varied between different workgroups within the same organisation. The research also evaluated the extent to which group-level safety climates were statistically linked to the injury/incident performance of workgroups in the three organisations. Although limited by the reliance on macro-incident data as the measure of workgroup safety performance, workers’ perceptions of supervisors’ safety expectations were inversely correlated with injury/incident rate in one organisation. The results provide much needed empirical evidence revealing the important role played by supervisors in defining the workgroup safety climates. Given that supervisors are a critical conduit through which organisational safety goals are articulated and achieved, the results indicate that the safety responses of first-level supervisors are likely to be just as important as, if not more so, than the actions of top management in construction organisations.