AbstractIn industries in which organizations work in decentralized and distributed structures such as construction, workers are more likely to be influenced by their workgroup supervisors than ...upper-level management. A study was conducted to quantitatively examine the relationships among supervisory safety communication, group safety climate, and safety behaviors, as well as to qualitatively explore effective ways for supervisors to communicate safety expectations and information to workers. A survey was conducted among workers engaged in rail construction work in Melbourne, Australia. Survey data were collected from 20 workgroups across 11 different worksites. Participant observation was also performed on these worksites to observe safety-related interactions and communication between supervisors and workers. The quantitative research results show that supervisory safety communication practices play a critical role in shaping safety climate within workgroups, which subsequently affects workers’ self-reported safety compliance and safety participation behaviors. The on-site participant observations identified various characteristics of effective safety communication between supervisors and coworkers, including regular engagement, consistent messages and actions, active listening, approachability, personal messages, and respectful delivery. The research results provide important practical implications for construction organizations to dedicate resources to developing supervisors’ leadership capabilities and personal skills, which could contribute to improved safety communication and safety performance in the workplace.
AbstractDespite the bidirectional nature of work-family conflict, existing studies have focused mainly on work-to-family conflict. This study addresses that shortcoming through proposing an ...integrated work-family conflict model and testing the model on South African construction professionals. The model considered cross-boundary relationships between the work and family domains and the bidirectional nature of work-family conflict. Data were collected by means of an online questionnaire survey administered to construction professionals registered with their respective statutory councils. A total of 695 valid responses were subject to data analysis. The research results indicate that construction professionals’ experiences of work-to-family conflict are positively associated with work pressure while negatively associated with job autonomy and schedule control. Work pressure can negatively spill over to the family domain through the boundary-spanning activity of work contact (i.e., after-hours, work-related contact), which then leads to work-to-family conflict. Construction professionals’ experiences of family-to-work conflict are predicted by household tasks and childcare demands. Partner support is a useful family-domain resource in alleviating family-to-work conflict. Childcare demands can interfere with the work domain through family contact (i.e., being contacted by family to deal with family matters while at work), which then results in family-to-work conflict. Work-to-family conflict predicts family-to-work contact, but not the reverse. In terms of consequences, work-family conflict in both directions directly predicts psychological distress. Both work-to-family conflict and family-to-work conflict are also associated with sleep problems and alcohol use but through different pathways. This study highlights the important roles of an effective work design and useful boundary management tactics in protecting construction professionals from experiencing excessive work-family conflict.
AbstractSafety climate has a positive impact on safety performance in the construction industry; it is a multilevel phenomenon that can be formed at the organization and group levels, especially in ...large organizations with a multilevel management structure. This study investigates how organizational support cascades down to cultivate a group-level safety climate at two time points over a 2-year period through a relationship with an organization-level safety climate, supervisory safety-specific transformation leadership, and coworker support in a large US-based construction contractor. Structural equation modeling analysis on data from an online survey among 284 construction professionals shows, unlike prior research, that organizational support at one point in time does not directly predict a subsequent group-level safety climate. Instead, it affects the group-level safety climate through the mediation effect of supervisory safety-specific transformational leadership and organization-level safety climate and its moderating effect on the relationship between coworker support and group-level safety climate. Importantly, the results also suggest that safety-specific transformational leadership may be an even more important predictor of group-level safety climate than organization-level safety climate and coworker support. These results imply that organizational support could focus on empowering leaders to demonstrate safety-specific transformational leadership behaviors for the sake of promoting a group-level safety climate.
•JD-R model were used to depict what factors affect safety leadership.•Job characteristics and personal resources affect safety leadership via engagement.•Personal resources moderate how job ...characteristics affect engagement.
Although research has shown that safety leadership is a strong predictor of safety outcomes, it is unclear what factors lead to safety leadership. This unexplored area has hindered the development of effective interventions to promote safety leadership.This study addresses the knowledge gap by examining how job characteristics and personal resources influence construction leaders’ engagement in safety leadership based on the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model in positive psychology. An online survey was distributed to all managerial employees in a large U.S. construction organization, resulting in 383 valid responses. The structural equation modeling analysis indicates that job characteristics (social support, work autonomy and risk perception) and personal resources (psychological capital) significantly contribute to safety-specific transformational leadership through work engagement. Moreover, psychological capital moderates the effect of social support on leaders’ engagement in safety leadership. The implications of the present findings regarding safety leadership research are also discussed.
Construction is a demanding work environment. Many construction professionals experience workplace stress, leading to physiological, psychological and sociological strain effects. They adopt a ...variety of coping mechanisms to manage these effects. A purposive sample of 36 construction professionals (architects, project managers, construction managers, civil engineers and quantity surveyors) in Cape Town, South Africa, were surveyed regarding their perceptions of workplace strain effects and stress counter measures. The Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis non-parametric tests were used for data analysis. The findings show that the highest-ranked strain effects in terms of impact were (in descending order): "frustration", "fatigue", "strain on personal relationships", "strain on professional relationships", and "anger/irritability". Male professionals identified greater fatigue and frustration effects than females; while females felt a greater lack of self-confidence. The highest-ranked coping mechanisms in terms of impact were "travel", "non-competitive sporting activity", "music", "increased caffeine intake", and "walking". Males preferred more intensive physical activities than did females. Architects experienced anxiety more frequently than other professional groups. This study confirms important strain effects experienced by construction professionals and highlights the nature and effectiveness of counter measures. Limitations of the study include its exploratory nature and small sample size. Future research should establish the associations between strain effects and coping measures, in terms of how construction organizations can better support wellbeing among their professional employees.
•Construction professionals’ work-life conflict experience is bi-directional in nature.•Work demands affect work-to-family conflict both directly, and indirectly through role blurring.•Construction ...professionals are more susceptible to work demands compared to family demands.•Construction professionals’ work-family conflict experience varies according to job position and work authority.
The demanding work environment of the construction industry has spawned many studies on construction professionals’ experiences of work-to-family conflict. Relatively less attention has been placed on family-to-work conflict. Many employees in modern organizations play a role in both work and family domains and juggle between work and family responsibilities, underscoring the need to holistically understand work-family experiences of construction professionals. This study considered the bi-directional nature of work-family conflict and proposed an integrated research model to examine the work-family interface among South African construction professionals. Data (n = 864) were collected through an online survey administered to construction professionals registered with their respective statutory councils. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was employed to test the research hypotheses. Within the work domain, work demands (i.e., work pressure and work hours) affect work-to-family conflict, both directly and indirectly, through the boundary-spanning demand of role blurring. Regarding workplace social support, only co-worker support is negatively associated with work-to-family conflict but not supervisor support. Within the family domain, the number of young children living at home and household task demands are positively associated with family-to-work conflict, while partner support is negatively associated with family-to-work conflict. Work-to-family conflict positively affects family-to-work conflict, but not the reverse. Work demands and role blurring experienced by professionals are likely to be affected by their job position and level of work authority. The findings suggest that organizations in the construction industry should protect their employees from experiencing excessive work-family conflict through creating a socially-supportive workplace environment, providing work-family programmes that foster greater boundary flexibility, and implementing effective work design characterised by reasonable workloads and work hours.
Photographic Q-methodology was used to explore construction professionals' mental models of occupational health and safety (OHS). Sixty Australian construction professionals participated in the ...research, including 15 architects, 15 engineers, 15 constructors and 15 OHS professionals. Participants were asked to sort photographs depicting different building systems into a grid based upon their judgement of the likelihood of accidental injury resulting from the construction of each of the building systems depicted. Responses ranged from Rare (-2) to Almost certain (+2). Sorting patterns relating to eight photographs of different façade systems were analysed using Q factor analysis. Three distinct sorting pattern types were identified in the data, representing clusters of participants whose sorting patterns were similar. These sorting pattern types cut across occupational/professional groups. Interpretation of the factors revealed substantial differences between the OHS judgements made by participants in the three clusters. Qualitative explanatory information revealed participants in the three clusters used different attributes when considering the likelihood of accidental injury. These attributes shaped their sorting patterns. The results suggest shared mental models (SMMs) are unlikely to exist in construction project teams, as each individual uses their own frame of reference to understand OHS. Opportunities exist to understand these different frames of reference and create more consistent team mental models of OHS. However, incorporating a diversity of viewpoints into project decision-making is recommended in order to produce effective decision-making in the choice or specification of building systems.
AbstractPsychosocial job quality has been proven to be linked to workers’ mental health. Drawing on a life course perspective, this study sought to identify, compare, and contrast the psychosocial ...characteristics of job quality that are related to mental health in three age groups of manual/nonmanagerial construction workers, i.e., young workers, middle-aged workers, and older workers. Data were extracted from the national and longitudinal Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey data set. The study used 15 waves of data from the HILDA survey with 6,352 responses from 1,768 participants. Longitudinal random-intercept regression models were used to examine the association between each of five aspects of job quality (i.e., job demands and complexity, job control, perceived job security, effort-reward fairness, and job intensity) and mental health. Overall, the research results showed that construction workers’ mental health declined when experiencing adverse job conditions and the magnitude of decline increased as the number of job adversities increased. Specifically, workers of the midage group experienced more accelerated decline in mental health compared with the other two groups when experiencing two adverse job conditions. Age-related differences were also identified in the way that individual job quality aspects are related to mental health. Although low job security and perceived unfairness of effort and reward were significant predictors of mental ill-health in all age groups, job demand and complexity and high job intensity were predictors of mental ill-health in midage and older construction workers but were not significant contributors to mental ill-health among younger workers. The findings highlight the need to develop targeted approaches to protecting and promoting the mental health of construction workers in different age groups.
A research model was proposed investigating the relationships between work demand, role blurring, work-to-family conflict, and health and wellbeing consequences, and the model was tested on ...registered South African construction professionals. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to analyze the data collected from an online survey. The research results show that work pressure is a salient antecedent to all role blurring activities, i.e. after-hours work contact, pre-occupation with work, and multi-tasking between job tasks and family tasks whilst at home. Work hours directly predict work contact but indirectly affect pre-occupation and multi-tasking via the mediating role of work contact. All role blurring activities are positively associated with construction professionals' experience of work-to-family conflict, which subsequently leads to depression and sleep problems. The results also show that depression affects the quality of sleep and construction professionals are likely to use alcohol consumption to cope with sleep problems. However, depression was found to be negatively associated with alcohol consumption, which calls for a more fine-grained analysis of the relationship. The study highlights the importance of appropriate work design with manageable workloads and reasonable work hours, and the promotion of boundary tactics for reducing work-family role blurring and conflict experienced by construction professionals.
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