The Effects of Group Safety Climate on Construction Personnel's Safety Behavior: A Cross-level Investigation

Abstract

Safety climate can be conceptualized at both the individual and group levels, and there is no consensus as to its operationalization. In the construction safety research, rare efforts have been made to investigate the effects of both individual differences and contextual factors on safety outcomes. To fill the knowledge gap, this paper takes group safety climate (safety climate at the group level) as a contextual factor and examines its impact on construction personnel's safety behavior, along with construction personnel's individual attributes. Data were collected from 157 construction personnel nested in 33 work crews in an ongoing railway project, and then analyzed with the ordinary least squares regression technique. The findings show that members within the same group develop shared safety climate perceptions and members of different groups have significantly different safety climate perceptions. Group safety climate level predicts individual safety behavior, controlling for individual attributes. Group safety climate level also predicts group safety behavior.