Research on the Tournament Incentive Mechanism of the Safety Behavior for Construction Workers: Considering Multiple Heterogeneity.

Liuyang Ji,Yifan Zhang,Wenyao Liu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.796295

Abstract

The unsafe behavior of construction workers is one of the most important and direct causes of safety accidents. Managers usually develop effective incentives aimed at regulating worker safety behavior. Due to the large number of workers in construction projects, there are multiple differences in fairness preference, risk preference and ability level, which will lead to the complex effect of the traditional mechanism to regulate workers’ safety behavior. In order to improve the effectiveness of incentive measures for worker safety behavior, this paper takes into account the multiple differences of individual workers’ fairness preference, risk preference and ability level, based on the tournament mechanism to construct a competition incentive model. By designing a tournament reward and salary distribution for heterogeneous workers, the occurrence of unsafe behaviors can be reduced. The study found that in terms of the optimal level of safety investment, workers with risk aversion attitude generally invest higher than that of workers with risk preference, no matter whether they have a strong fairness preference or not; In terms of the distribution of tournament rewards, workers with a risk aversion attitude and a higher level of fairness preference need to be given higher incentives.

Highlights

The engineering construction process usually faces the complex challenges of the construction environment, technology and on-site management, making it more prone to safety accidents than other industries (He et al, 2020)
Due to the different learning abilities of individual workers and the mastery of knowledge system in safe operation, the time and energy spent by each worker in safety investment will vary to a large extent (Gurtler and Krakel, 2010)
Tournament incentives based on the heterogeneous characteristics of workers can play the following two roles: (1) The salary gap in tournament can motivate all workers to increase safety investment during the construction process; (2) For construction workers with a higher level of fairness preference and risk aversion, the manager should formulate a larger incentive coefficient

Summary

Introduction

The engineering construction process usually faces the complex challenges of the construction environment, technology and on-site management, making it more prone to safety accidents than other industries (He et al, 2020). In China, in the first half of 2018, there were 1,732 safety accidents and 1,752 deaths in the construction industry, an increase of 7.8 and 1.4%, respectively (Han et al, 2019b). In the United States, there were more than 60,000 construction worker injuries in the construction industry in 2018, which was 32.6% higher than the average for all industries. Research on Safety Behavior Incentive (Han et al, 2019a). From the statistics on the frequency of fatal construction accidents published by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the top five accidents (falling accident, electric shock accident, object strike, mechanical injury and collapse accident) are directly related to unsafe behavior of workers (Choe et al, 2016). Oswald et al (2018) proposed that 88% of accidents in construction projects involve unsafe behavior

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