Barriers to Safety Participation of Construction Workers in Project Organization from a Stress Perspective

Abstract

Safety participation of construction workers, as a manifestation of organizational citizenship behaviors, is essential for overall workplace safety. Workers’ safety participation may be influenced by both organizational and individual factors. For example, facing unfavorable organizational conditions such as job insecurity may restrain construction workers from safety participation, and individual capacity differs the preference for safety participation among workers. Moreover, the nature of their job is often stressful, which complicates the mechanisms through which safety participation is influenced. The current study set to examine the key barriers to safety participation of construction workers in project organizations and reveal the intermediate effect of stress and empathy on the influential mechanism. The empirical study collected over 500 sets of data from construction workers through a questionnaire survey. After reliability and validity tests, structural equation modeling (SEM) and multiple regression were applied to examine the interactions among organizational factors, stress, empathy, and safety participation. Findings of current study confirmed that (1) safety participation of construction workers was restrained due to emotional stress and emotional exhaustion; (2) the negative influence of several organizational factors on safety participation of workers were mediated by stress, namely, quantitative job insecurity–safety participation interactions mediated by emotional stress and both qualitative job insecurity–safety participation interactions and interpersonal conflict–safety participation interactions mediated by emotional stress and emotional exhaustion; and (3) the buffering effect of empathy on stress and safety participation was interestingly not confirmed by this study. Practical recommendations were proposed to manage occupational stress and address barriers to safety participation. This paper contributes to safety management in project organizations by highlighting the interplay among organizational, individual, and psychological factors and their impacts on safety participation from a stress perspective. Findings of the current study provide valuable insights to promote safety participations of workers in practices.