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Factors Affecting Safety Performance of Construction Workers PDF

127 Pages·2017·1.93 MB·English
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Factors Affecting Safety Performance of Construction Workers: Safety Climate, Interpersonal Conflicts at Work, and Resilience by Yuting Chen A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Civil Engineering University of Toronto © Copyright by Yuting Chen 2017 Factors Affecting Safety Performance of Construction Workers: Safety Climate, Interpersonal Conflicts at Work, and Resilience Yuting Chen Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Civil Engineering University of Toronto 2017 Abstract 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. ii  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. iii Acknowledgments I have been enjoying my life in the University of Toronto, where I met lots of genius professors, kind friends, and smart colleagues. However, life is not always easy. I started my Ph.D. in 2012, and I was lost in the beginning. I did not know where my research could go, and I was not sure whether I am a person who can do research and who can do research well. Language was also a problem for me then. Fortunately, life is beautiful in spite of bumps. In 2014 June, I was fortunate enough to join Dr. McCabe’s group when I was on the edge of quitting. Since then, suddenly, the door of a new life was opened for me. I worked with Dr. McCabe on a safety research project, where my Ph.D. thesis was based. Dr. McCabe has been teaching me how to write proposal, how to write papers, and demonstrating how to be a good teacher. She works so hard and always used her weekend and vacation time to modify my papers and thesis. Her engagement, encouragement and patience has helped me not only progress my research but also build my confidence. There are so many things I want to list but cannot exhaust. I really want to express my sincere gratitude to Dr. McCabe for her generous support and for her love to students. Without her, I wouldn’t have finished my Ph.D. My special thanks also go to Prof. Douglas Hyatt. As a co-investigator of my research project and a member of my doctoral committee, he provided so many constructive and valuable suggestions, especially on quantitative research methods. I am also very grateful for the advice received from Prof. Kim Pressnail and Prof. Daman Panesar. As members of my doctoral committee, they reviewed my thesis very thoroughly and provided their insights into my research from different perspectives. I would also like to thank Prof. Aminah Robinson Fayek from the University of Alberta for her thoughtful advice, especially her advice on safety performance measures. I am very grateful for the support of colleagues and friends in our research group: Hesam Hamledari, Patrick Marquis, Hiba Ali, Pouya Zangeneh, Farid Mirahadi, Arash Shahi, Kamelia Shahi, and Eric Junting Li. Especially, I would like to thank Hesam for his encouragement and inspiration. Hesam is a great friend and sometimes a good teacher. He is very talented and productive. I am impressed by his hard work. I always learned a lot from him during our discussion of logic development in academic research. He is studying in Standford as a Ph.D. student now. I wish him best wishes for his bright future. I would also like to thank Patrick for his support and efforts to collect safety data from Ottawa, and I would also like to thank Hiba for her iv great advice on my defense presentation slides. I am also very grateful that I always learn a lot from Farid and Pouya during our discussion of working conditions on remote construction sites. My special thanks also go to Bangbiao Wu, Ze Wang, and Ruochen Nan. They are great friends. I am very happy and lucky to meet them in Toronto and have them being with me. I am very grateful for the help and support from them. I really enjoyed the time when we played board games together, when we had hot pots together, and when we played in Treetop treckking zipline parks, etc. My dull Ph.D. life becomes more colorful because of them. A deep and heartfelt thank you go to my families, especially my parents. They always support me for any decisions I made. I am very happy to live in such a love family! Finally, I would like to thank Sheng, my love and friend. His encouragement and support made me overcome all bumps and difficulties in the past four years. I also wish him best wishes for his fascinating research journey. v Table of Contents Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents ....................................................................................................................... vi List of Tables .............................................................................................................................. x List of Figures ........................................................................................................................... xii List of Acronyms and Abbreviations ......................................................................................... xiii List of Symbols.......................................................................................................................... xv Chapter 1 Introduction ................................................................................................................ 1 1.1. Research objectives ..................................................................................................... 3 1.2. Thesis overview ........................................................................................................... 4 1.2.1. Data collection ...................................................................................................... 7 1.2.2. Data analysis ........................................................................................................ 8 1.3. Chapter Summaries ....................................................................................................12 1.3.1. Chapter 2 “Impact of individual resilience and safety climate on safety performance and psychological stress of construction workers: a case study of the Ontario construction industry” .........................................................................................................13 1.3.2. Chapter 3 “The relationship between individual resilience, interpersonal conflicts at work, safety outcomes of construction workers” .................................................................14 1.3.3. Chapter 4 “Resilience on construction sites: testing a structural equation model” 15 Chapter 2 Impact of individual resilience and safety climate on safety performance and psychological stress of construction workers: a case study of the Ontario construction industry .................................................................................................................................................20 2.1. Introduction .................................................................................................................21 2.1.1. Safety climate dimensions ...................................................................................23 2.1.2. Safety climate and safety outcomes .....................................................................24 vi 2.1.3. Individual resilience, safety outcomes, and psychological stress..........................24 2.1.4. Injuries and psychological stress ..........................................................................25 2.2. Methods ......................................................................................................................25 2.2.1. Data and procedure .............................................................................................25 2.2.2. Measures .............................................................................................................29 2.2.2.1. Individual resilience ..........................................................................................29 2.2.2.2. Safety climate ...................................................................................................30 2.2.3. Data analysis .......................................................................................................31 2.3. Results ........................................................................................................................33 2.3.1. Measurement model ............................................................................................33 2.3.2. Inter-correlations among the variables .................................................................34 2.3.3. Structural model ...................................................................................................38 2.4. Discussion ..................................................................................................................40 2.5. Conclusions ................................................................................................................41 Chapter 3 The relationship between individual resilience, interpersonal conflicts at work, safety outcomes of construction workers .............................................................................................42 3.1. Introduction .................................................................................................................42 3.1.1. ICW, safety outcomes, and stress ........................................................................44 3.1.2. Antecedents of ICW .............................................................................................45 3.2. Methods ......................................................................................................................46 3.2.1. Data and collection procedures ............................................................................46 3.2.2. Data analysis .......................................................................................................51 3.3. Results ........................................................................................................................53 3.3.1. Measurement model ............................................................................................53 vii 3.3.2. Descriptive statistics ............................................................................................54 3.3.3. Structural model ...................................................................................................56 3.4. Discussion ..................................................................................................................58 3.5. Conclusions ................................................................................................................60 Chapter 4 Resilience on construction sites: testing a structural equation model ........................61 4.1. Introduction .................................................................................................................61 4.1.1. Resilience indicators ............................................................................................63 4.1.2. Hypotheses ..........................................................................................................64 4.2. Methods ......................................................................................................................65 4.2.1. Data and procedures ...........................................................................................65 4.2.2. Measures .............................................................................................................69 4.2.3. Data analysis .......................................................................................................70 4.3. Results ........................................................................................................................72 4.3.1. Measurement model ............................................................................................72 4.3.2. Descriptive statistics ............................................................................................75 4.3.3. Structural model ...................................................................................................77 4.4. Discussion ..................................................................................................................81 4.5. Conclusions ................................................................................................................83 4.6. Limitations and future work .........................................................................................83 Chapter 5 Conclusions, recommendations, and future work......................................................85 5.1. Conclusions ................................................................................................................85 5.1.1. Impacts on physical injuries and unsafe events ...................................................85 5.1.2. Impacts on job stress ...........................................................................................86 5.2. Conference paper conclusions ....................................................................................86 viii 5.3. Contributions ...............................................................................................................87 5.4. Recommendations ......................................................................................................87 5.5. Future work .................................................................................................................87 References ...............................................................................................................................89 Appendix A ............................................................................................................................. 100 Appendix B ............................................................................................................................. 111 Appendix C ............................................................................................................................. 112 ix List of Tables Table 1-1. Focus of this research ............................................................................................... 4 Table 1-2. Survey details ........................................................................................................... 6 Table 1-3. Number of surveys by year and location ................................................................... 7 Table 1-4. SEM model fit indices ...............................................................................................12 Table 1-5. Hypotheses and testing results ................................................................................16 Table 2-1. Demographics of respondents ..................................................................................27 Table 2-2. Data representativeness ..........................................................................................27 Table 2-3. Frequency of safety outcomes .................................................................................28 Table 2-4. Frequency of job stress ............................................................................................29 Table 2-5. Comparisons of the hypothesized six-factor model of safety climate with selected alternative models .....................................................................................................................35 Table 2-6. Measurement model: squared multiple correlations (SMCs) and factor loadings ......35 Table 2-7. Descriptive statistics and correlations .......................................................................37 Table 2-8. Comparisons of model 1 and model 2 ......................................................................39 Table 2-9. Direct and indirect effect testing of the hypothesized model relationships ................40 Table 3-1. Demographics of respondents ..................................................................................48 Table 3-2. Frequency of physical safety outcomes ....................................................................50 Table 3-3. Frequency of job stress ............................................................................................51 Table 3-4. Fit indices for the measurement models ...................................................................53 Table 3-5. Measurement model: square multiple correlations (SMC) and factor loadings .........53 Table 3-6. Descriptive statistics of variables ..............................................................................54 Table 3-7. ICW individual statement frequency distribution (%) .................................................55 Table 3-8. Direct and indirect effect testing of the hypothesized model relationships ................58 x

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the resulting safety outcomes in the construction industry. scale (Schwarzer and Jerusalem 1995); an example statement is “I am confident that I
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