Abstract
What are the different perceptions on safety climate (SC) by workers and managers/supervisors engaged in the construction industry of developing countries? Reconciling these two differing views is pivotal for mitigating and avoiding both the injured and fatal accidents in the construction industry, especially in those developing countries where safety conditions are poor and unpredictable, and safety measures are inadequate in most cases. To answer this research question, the collective perceptions of 118 construction workers and 123 managers/supervisors on the SC in construction projects in Iran were gleaned and investigated. In particular, these perceptions were initially collected by two different empirical surveys validated by a sample of university professors and construction managers and then analyzed through the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) test and Bartlett’s test of sphericity under factor analysis, together with a one-sample t-test. Results indicated that “workers’ attitudes and perceptions”, “safety knowledge and training”, “working relationships and roles of colleagues”, and “workers’ risk perceptions” are important categories of SC factors perceived by construction workers, whereas “safety rules and management practices” is the essential category of SC factors discerned by managers/supervisors. The difference in perceptions between workers and managers/supervisors is considered to be beneficial for an overall understanding of SC in general and for developing countries in particular. Moreover, a series of effective suggestions for improving SC in the construction industry of developing countries are provided with reference to each category. The views of SC factors are reinforced as a social process combining the synergies of workers and managers/supervisors, as well as proper safety training to be pushed forward as an essential activity that should be incorporated in human resources development of construction organizations so as to improve the existing level of SC, leading to fewer accidents at the industry level.
Highlights
The socio-economic development of countries is often dependent on their construction industry, which is classified as a high hazard industry where workers are normally engaged in activities that can expose them to serious hazards
Collected responses were first tested for reliability and analyzed using factor analysis; the SPSS software was used to carry out the analysis
Results of the study initially provide five categories as the most important for safety climate (SC), namely: (i) workers’ attitudes and perceptions; (ii) safety knowledge and training; (iii) working relationships and roles of colleagues; (iv) workers’ risk perceptions; and (v) safety rules and management practices. These are partly aligned with the four core dimensions of SC discovered by an empirical study [59]—collecting empirical data from 21 Chinese construction enterprises—which are: (i) safety priority; (ii) safety supervision, training, and communication; (iii) safety rules and procedures; and (iv) safety involvement
Summary
The socio-economic development of countries is often dependent on their construction industry, which is classified as a high hazard industry where workers are normally engaged in activities that can expose them to serious hazards. Great developments have been made as a result of improving preventive measures, the rates of both fatalities and injuries are still unacceptably high [1,2]. In this regard, unsafe behaviors are known to be Sustainability 2021, 13, 10398. Most construction research studies focusing on sustainable construction in general [11,12], and SC in construction in particular, have been conducted in developed countries with a homogenous western cultural environment, such as the USA, UK and Canada, or some
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