Influence of Learning from Incidents, Safety Information Flow, and Resilient Safety Culture on Construction Safety Performance

Abstract

The inevitable incidents (including accidents and near misses) that occur on construction sites provide opportunities to extract experience, optimize positive outcomes, and decrease the reoccurrence of unwanted events. Learning from incidents (LFI) is defined as an organizational capability to extract experience from incidents and convert them into preventive safety measures. Safety information flow (SIF) and resilient safety culture (RSC) have been found to be closely related to critical aspects of organizational safety management, such as reasoning incident causes and organizational learning. However, the interaction of LFI, SIF, and RSC and how it affects safety performance remain unclear. This study designed a questionnaire to investigate their interrelations. The questionnaire was distributed to construction companies from the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong, and the collected valid responses were analyzed using partial least-squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The results showed that LFI directly affects the reactive measures of safety performance, i.e., the occurrence frequency of accidents, near misses, and similar events on construction worksites. SIF positively impacts LFI, and RSC plays a mediating role in their relationship. The findings deepen the theoretical interpretation of SIF, RSC, and LFI. SIF facilitates LFI by reasoning the causes of incidents, and RSC provides a supportive environment for upgrading LFI. The findings also guide practitioners to improve LFI and construction safety performance by taking measures to ensure nondefective safety information and smooth information flow within the resilient cultural context.