Empirical Analysis And Comparative Study Between Safety Culture And Safety Performance In Construction Corporations

Building and construction industry for engineering projects, featured by its construction mobility, environmental complexity, labor intensity and cumbersome process, hasa considerablehigh safety incident rate, and it has becomea typical high-risk industry. As a method to correct unsafe behaviors and improve the reliability of the entire industry, instilling Safety Culture is producing durable, stable and comprehensive effect. That is why it has become a research focus in academic circle as well as an emphasis of the safety management implementation in practical field. However, researches focusing on function mechanism between safety culture and safety performance at construction industry in different countries have been rarely seen. Therefore, research in the article, focusing on safety culture and safety performance, argues separately the safety culture connotation of the construction projects in China, Pakistan and Africa and their influences on safety performance through empirical research method from an international point of viewand conducts a comparative study. Besides, on the above theoretical basis, the research advises China based engineering&construction corporations on how to further improve their safety management and enforce competitiveness in overseas market.First, the research conducts empirical study on the safety culture and safety performance statistics data sheet. By conducting exploratory factor analysis via SPSS statistical software, it has found out that the safety culture of construction projects of China contains four factors: circumstantial culture, conceptual culture, institutional culture and substantial culture. And the safety performance contains two factors:safety behavior and safety outcome. By applying structural equation analysis software AMOS to verify the relationship of these six factors, the research has concluded that circumstantial culture puts negative effects on safety behavior and institutional culture gives the most impacts on safety behavior.Second, empirical study on the Pakistani data of safety culture and safety performance questionnaire has been conducted by utilizing the same statistical software and structural equation analysis software. From the exploratory factor analysis, the research reached a conclusion that the construction projects of Pakistan contain four factors:management level concept culture, working class concept culture, institutional culture and substantial culture. And the safety performance contains two factors:safety behavior and safety outcome. By applying structural equation analysis software to verify the relationship of these six factors, the research came to a conclusion:indicated institutional culture concept culture impacts most on safety outcome; working class concept culture puts direct effect on safety behavior; management level gives considerable influence on working class concept culture and its influence is second only to the institutional culture on the safety outcome; substantial culture directly affects the safety behavior and it has small impact on the safety outcome.Furthermore, empirical study on the African data of safety culture and safety performance questionnaire has been conducted by utilizing the same statistical software and structural equation analysis software. On this basis, the research has comparatively analyzed the impacts on safety performances given by safety culture of the construction projects in China, Pakistan and Africa. After exploratory factor analysis, the research has proven that the construction projects of Africa contain three factors:concept culture, institutional culture and substantial culture. While safety performance contains three factors:safety compliance, safety participation and safety outcome. The research verified the relationship among these six factors via structural equation analysis software, and the result shows institutional culture has influenced the safety outcome most; substantial culture puts little effect on safety compliance and has no direct impact on safety participation; concept culture’s impact on safety outcome is less than institutional culture.To sum up, this paper separately built up Culture-Safety Performance Effect Relationship Models for the projects in China, Pakistan and Africa, conducted case study and comparative study, and came to some significant research conclusions.