The relationship among Safety Culture Model Constructs in construction

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increasing number of studies on safety climate across multiple industries. These studies include efforts in validating the role of safety climate as an indicator for safety behavior and organizational safety management. Although extensive studies empirically validated the relationships among the safety culture constructs and safety outcomes, the theoretical underlying relationships are not well defined. Moreover, the results of these studies are not consistent based on various theoretical hypothesis and methodological approaches. There lacks a systematic analysis of these theories and methodologies that were utilized in these studies to identify the inconsistency. Lastly, the relationships were established across multiple industries with a broad view of measuring safety climate and safety performance. The validation of safety climate in the construction industry remains challenging. This research studies the conceptual basis and methodologies within safety climate literature, with a focus on the construction industry, and discusses the gaps in establishing the relationships. Two types of gaps are identified: conceptual and methodological gaps. Conceptual gaps include the misalignment in concepts and the misalignment in domain context. Methodological gaps refer to the misalignment between the theoretical implications of safety climate and its measurement in terms of data collection and/or data analysis approaches. The main outcome is the need to define a framework to validate leading indicators, such as safety climate, based upon the underlying relationships specific in the construction industry.