Organizational culture of safety in the Hong Kong construction industry

Abstract

Safety Culture is a multi-dimensional indicator of employees’ psychological, behavioural and situational responses to safety management in an organization. The behavioural aspect is concerned with “what people do” within the organization, and it includes the safety-related activities, actions and behaviours exhibited by employees. Situational aspects describe “what the organization has for its policies, operating procedures, management systems, control systems, communication flows and workflow systems”. Psychological aspects can be described as “how employees see and feel their organization in respect of safety”. Safety culture is regarded as an indicator of the organizational effectiveness of safety management performance. The study bridges three gaps identified in the existing literature through the development of a framework which identifies the motivation factors and behaviour that enhance an organization’s safety culture through testing the framework among a sample of site management staff, site supervisory staff and workers. These issues were explored as, firstly, there is a lack research to identify what are the motivational factors that bring about enhancement of the organizational safety culture. Secondly, there is very little research on the type of behaviour that can improve the safety culture of the organization. Thirdly, very few studies have explicitly explored the effect of the combination of motivation factors and behavioral factors together to achieve an improved safety culture. The study adopted a quantitative approach method. Five hypotheses concerning the relationship amongst the types of motivation factors, a type of pro-social behaviour and the combination effects on safety culture were tested quantitatively. Data were collected through questionnaire survey from 60 construction sites in Hong Kong including 60 site management staff, 125 site supervisory staff, and 250 workers. These three groups of respondents’ data were used to test the hypotheses by the use of correlation and hierarchical regression analyses. The results of the analyses were further verified through interviewees on 20 sites with a total of 20 respondents from each group of respondents. The findings of the study suggest that there are common motivational and behavioural factors among these three groups of employees that can enhance safety culture. The workers display a greater range of motivational and behavioural factors for enhancement than do the site management staff and the site supervisory staff. The findings also suggest that there is a mediation effect coming from the behavioral factors upon the motivational factors when they exist concurrently. This study contributes to the field of safety management by developing a theoretical framework for safety culture that can be applied at both attitudinal and behavioural levels. This provides the basis for comprehensive evaluation of motivation and behavioural factors with their relationship to safety culture in existing safety management settings; thus, it can point to strategies to be used to improve the effectiveness of the safety management system in the Hong Kong construction industry. The research also provides a generic model which can be developed for use for risk management in general.