Factors affecting safety performance of construction workers: Safety climate, interpersonal conflicts at work, and resilience

A safety plateau in safety performance has been observed in many countries or regions. In order to continuously improve safety performance, the key is to identifying factors affecting safety performance. This research examined four factors, namely, safety climate, individual resilience (IR), interpersonal conflicts at work (ICW), and organizational resilience (OR) that may contribute to explaining safety outcomes. A self-administered survey was used. From 2013 to 2016, 1281 surveys were collected from 180 construction sites of Ontario, Canada. This thesis composed three papers, which leads to the following conclusions: • Safety climate not only affects physical safety outcomes but also employees' job stress level. • ICW is a risk factor for safety performance. • IR has the potential to mitigate post-trauma job stress and interpersonal conflicts of construction workers. • Management commitment is the key to promoting a good safety culture. • Safety awareness is the most important individual factor affecting construction workers' safety performance. • Team support, especially the support from coworkers, has a significant positive impact on construction worker's safety awareness. Several original contributions were made: • This study designed and tested questions of individual resilience. • This study is the first empirical study investigating the impact of individual resilience on safety outcomes. • This study is the first study testing the antecedents of interpersonal conflicts at work and the resulting safety outcomes in the construction industry. • This study designed and tested organizational resilience questions in the context of construction industry. • This is the first study testing the mechanism about how the resilience factors interact with each other and eventually affect safety outcomes. • This study is the first study using structural equation modeling (SEM) to quantify organizational resilience. Accordingly, the following recommendations were provided: • Construction organizations need to not only monitor employees' safety performance but also their psychological well-being. • Safety professionals may consider adding coping skill training programs to improve the individual resilience of their workforce and reduce conflict-related safety outcomes. • Construction organizations can improve employees' safety awareness by promoting a good team-level safety culture, and by building a good reporting and learning culture.