How important is individual role clarity and supervisor presence in construction safety?
This surveyed 810 front-line workers across 74 US projects covering their roles, experience, supervisor onsite engagement, and perceptions of the organisation’s commitment to safety.
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Extracts:
• “Companies with a well-established safety climate [SC] have more engaged and satisfied employees … experience less turnover … and report lower non-compliance and injury rates compared to [lower performers]”
• SC “reflects the shared perceptions of employees regarding the practices and norms that are encouraged to promote safe operations in high-risk industrial settings”
• “Active supervision plays a critical role in shaping the safety climate of front-line workers” and includes “regular engagement with workers, active listening, and approachability”
• “Individual and coworkers’ role clarity emerged as the most important predictors of perceived safety climate”
• Expectedly, “higher levels of role clarity and supervisor presence onsite were associated with higher levels of safety climate”
• “individual role clarity explained 69% of the variability in safety climate scores, indicating its main role in predicting higher levels of climate”
• “Conversely, the supervisor’s participation in pre-job safety meetings appeared as the least influential predictor”
• “workers rated safety climate as high if they were unclear about their peers’ roles within the company, and medium if they clear about their roles”
• “Novice workers (i.e., those who have been working in the company for less than nine months) who were less clear about their individual roles, reported lower safety climate scores, even when their supervisors regularly attended pre-job safety meetings”
• In all, “ensuring that workers are extremely clear about their individual and coworkers’ roles has a strong probability of achieving a high safety climate. This effect occurs regardless of work experience”
• “When roles are ill-defined in workers who are new to the company (i.e., those who have worked in the company for less than nine months), the effect is a poorly perceived [SC]”
• “The dichotomy between safety presence onsite and safety climate suggests that safety supervision is only relevant when workers are clear about their roles and expectations at work”
• “The supervisor’s participation in pre-job safety meetings had the least influence on the perceived safety climate of front-line workers”
• “Nonetheless, the frequency at which supervisors attend pre-job safety meetings emerged as the most important feature related to supervisory presence onsite”
• “increasingly having supervisors onsite may not have the desired effect unless the supervisor regularly engages in pre-job safety meetings with workers”
Study link: https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784486993.102
