https://doi.org/10.24928/2023/0114

Safety Culture in Construction Industry of Nepal

Prajwol Neupane¹ & Farook Hamzeh²

¹Graduate student, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Alberta, Canada, [email protected]
²Associate Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Alberta, Canada, [email protected]

Abstract

Safety culture is a critical aspect of ensuring safe and productive construction sites. However, many studies in the field of construction that focus on safety culture overlook the unique attributes of construction environments. Current models for safety culture in construction fail to fully encompass the dynamic and diverse nature of construction sites where individuals with differing backgrounds, professions, and levels of experience collaborate to complete projects. These individuals not only come from different cultures and speak different languages, but they also have various psychological, behavioral, and knowledge traits that can affect their safety practices and behaviors. Moreover, different organizations have different settings and perceptions about the safety of their workers and workplace, which can further complicate the development of effective safety cultures in construction. Therefore, there is a clear need for research that focuses on developing more context-specific models for safety culture in construction that can account for these unique attributes and complexities (Hallowell et al., 2016; Hinze and Tracey, 2016; Lingard et al., 2018). The present study presents a framework that incorporates multiple facets of safety culture, including psychological factors, organizational factors, knowledge and awareness, behavioral factors, safe working conditions, safety-oriented climate, resilience, and unsafe behaviors. The proposed framework captures the relationship between these variables and the safety culture of the construction industry in Nepal. The results inferred from the analysis of the survey showed that among the eight variables included in the study (psychological dimension, organizational dimension, knowledge dimension, behavioral dimension, safe workplace, safety climate, resilience, and unsafe behavior), seven of them (excluding unsafe behavior) had a direct positive impact on safety culture in the construction industry of Nepal. In other words, these seven variables were found to be positively associated with the development of a strong safety culture in the construction industry of Nepal. On the other hand, unsafe behavior was found to have a negative impact on safety culture, implying that if workers engage in unsafe behavior, it can undermine the development of a positive safety culture in the workplace.

Keywords

Safety practice, safety culture, construction.

Files

Reference

Neupane, P. & Hamzeh, F. 2023. Safety Culture in Construction Industry of Nepal, Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction (IGLC31) , 365-376. doi.org/10.24928/2023/0114

Download: BibTeX | RIS Format