Factors that influence safety culture in construction

Abstract

Although there is no consensus on how to define the safety culture of an organisation, the concept is now recognised as an essential contributor to improved occupational safety performance in construction. Indeed, the subject of safety culture has attracted considerable attention in the literature in recent years. The health and safety culture in an organisation is determined by the social and psychological relationships in the workplace. Some view safety culture as a management issue but so fuzzy to the extent that it cannot be measured or reliably changed. This paper aims to explore and to make explicit some of the key factors that influence safety culture in construction. The concepts of organisational culture and climate are firstly discussed. The concept of health and safety culture is then evaluated including the factors that influence it; its assessment and measurement methods. The results of interviews with site safety managers of construction companies that exhibit strong safety cultures are reported. The objective of this work was to determine what works for them. The results reveal that the factors that contribute to positive and negative safety cultures in construction can be grouped into six categories: organisation factors, individual factors, team factors, job design factors, management factors and supervisory factors.