Safety Leadership In Construction Industry: Theoretical And Empirical Study

The poor implementation of safety management regulations and technical countermeasures on construction sites leads to frequent accidents.One of the crucial reasons is the unqualified safety leadership across different levels of project management team.It is an important yet unsettled academic issue of how safety leadership impacts safety performance of construction projects.This thesis begins with extracting key elements and developing measurement scales of safety leadership in construction,and then reveal the mechanism of how safety leadership impacts safety performance of construction projects,so as to propose safety leadership behavior norms and specific safety leadership promotion strategies,which are expected to provide new ideas and methods to improve safety performance of construction projects.Firstly,this thesis applies the methods of ethnographic study and grounded theory to extract key elements of safety leadership in construction.Four dimensions are identified,i.e.safety influence and role modeling,safety coaching and motivation,safety caring and individual respect,and safety controlling and performance management.Then,a safety leadership model in construction is proposed to concisely depict the structure and impacting paths of safety leadership.Safety leaderships of owners,contractors and subcontractors are involved in the model,which also contains two major impacting paths,i.e.safety management and safety culture.Secondly,this thesis applies structured interviews and confirmatory factor analysis to build the factor structure of safety leadership in construction,and then develops measurement scales which can facilitate the empirical research of safety leadership.Thirdly,the structural equation modelling method is applied to probe into the relationships of safety leaderships among different project stakeholders.Then,the safety management and safety culture impacting paths are explored to interpret the mechanism of how safety leadership impacts safety performance of construction projects.Fourthly,based on the above research findings,this thesis extracts safety leadership behavior norms for construction practitioners.These behavior norms are the basis for the safety leadership promotion strategies.Based on literature review and empirical studies,it also discovers the evaluation indicators for safety leadership effectiveness.These indicators constitute the effectiveness evaluation criteria of safety leadership promotion strategies.Then,the action research method is applied to design and implement safety leadership promotion strategies on case projects.By the longitudinal evaluation,it validates the effectiveness and feasibility of these strategies,and also develops the general procedures of safety leadership promotion in construction projects.In summary,this thesis proposes the theoretical model of safety leadership in construction,which serves as a fundamental framework for deeper safety leadership study in the construction research area.The safety leadership factor structure and measurement scales facilitate the effective evaluation and continuous improvement of safety leadership in construction.The safety leadership relationships among different project stakeholders and the mechanism of how safety leadership impact safety performance expand the safety leadership research scope and provide new findings and perspectives.The safety leadership behavior norms and specific safety leadership promotion strategies provide new ideas and methods to improve safety performance of construction projects.Last but not least,the action-research-based safety leadership designing and implementing procedure serves as an important managerial tool with which practitioners can improve the normalization of safety leadership promotion actions.