The role of human safety interventions on co-workers’ safety outcomes in construction projects

Globally, the construction industry is known to have a high rate of recorded accidents, fatalities, or injuries. Historically, the behaviour of workers concerning safety matters was recognised as a significant factor leading to poor safety outcomes. Recently, insights from assessing workers’ safety climate have been used to improve workers’ safety. These insights often tend to focus on a worker’s perception about the leadership and/or self rather than the workgroup within which one operates. Considering the physical and social proximity of construction activities, the lack of attention on social and team practices, which are vital to construction activities, has resulted in challenges to accident reduction rates. Despite this, there is a limited body of knowledge on factors that influence workers’ perceptions, especially in the workgroup among co-workers. Owing to this, safety interventions have been suggested as possible antecedents that improve safety climate. Hence, this research aims to investigate how human safety interventions (HSIs) affect workgroup safety climate and co-workers’ safety behaviour. A quantitative approach employing a strategy using a cross-sectional survey collected data from 317 trade workers within five large commercial construction projects in New South Wales, Australia. Exploratory factor analysis, reliability analysis, descriptive statistics, and covariance-based structural equation modelling were used to develop and validate the HSI constructs. Following this, variance-based structural equation modelling was used to validate the theoretical model by evaluating thirteen proposed hypotheses. Due to the complexity of the model, another model was further developed to examine how co-workers’ safety outcomes influence workers’ perceptions about safety priority. Results from validating the HSI construct revealed two factors: psychological safety interventions and sociological safety interventions. An intersection was found between the two factors suggesting that they should be regarded as reflective-reflective higher-order constructs. Because the two factors tap into the same underlying concept. Thirteen out of the fourteen hypotheses were supported. The results suggest that HSIs do not directly influence co-workers’ safety behaviour. Instead, an increase in HSIs strengthens the relationship between how workers’ perceived the value of safety and co-workers’ safety behaviour. The study shows that, through social exchanges, the provision of HSIs positively improves workgroup safety climate. The relationship between supervisory environment and workgroup safety climate was strengthened by HSIs. A partial mediation was revealed, as the supervisory environment influences the workgroup safety climate through HSIs. An increase in safety outcomes was found to decrease the workgroup safety climate. The study also identified a route to reducing the number of accidents and near-misses on construction sites. The implication of the research is that it identifies supervisory environment, co-workers’ safety outcomes and HSIs as factors influencing the perceptions workers’ form about the priority of safety in their organisation. These outcomes contribute to the expansion of the safety climate theory in construction. The study confirms the role HSIs play in reducing risks and uncertainties while improving workers’ safety knowledge and reasoning. The implementation of HSIs by construction managers or safety professionals offers a fertile ground for the formation of workgroup safety climate. The study also stresses the need for a focus on co-workers as they are important agents of change in the development of safety perceptions by other workers. In addition, the research contributes to the development and validation of the HSI construct in construction. The validated HSI scale may be used to identify potential weaknesses within existing construction safety regimes. The scale has the potential, alongside other established safety constructs o function as a modifying factor in cultivating desired behaviours. The research also contributes to the categorisation of safety climate dimensions at various levels of climate analysis. Finally, the study provides implications for practice and recommendations for further study.