Development of Construction Workers Job Stress Scale to Study and the Relationship between Job Stress and Safety Behavior: An Empirical Study in Beijing

Abstract

Job stress is considered one of the critical causes of construction workers’ unsafe behaviors. As a mainstay industry in many countries, the construction industry has a considerable number of employees and the research on how job stress affects workers’ unsafe behaviors has important theoretical and practical significance to improve construction safety performance through better job stress management. In this study, the authors thoroughly reviewed the literature and conducted semi-structured interviews to identify the dimensions of job stress, designed the job stress scale and cited the safety behavior measurement scale. After that, a questionnaire survey was developed using the proposed measurement scale and distributed to the construction employees from a project in Beijing. One hundred fifty responses were collected and analyzed using reliability analysis to validate the scale’s internal consistency. Results from factor analysis indicate that the scales of job stress measurement can be grouped into six dimensions. To demonstrate the applicability of the developed scale on construction safety management research, the collected data was used to test the hypothesis that job stress has a negative correlation with safety behavior. Results show that the hypothesis is valid, and there is a negative correlation between job stress and safety behavior. In addition, finer results of the relationship between the six dimensions of job stress and safety behavior can be obtained. In summary, this study developed an improved stress scale for construction workers in China, and the proposed scale was validated by analyzing the data from an empirical study in Beijing.

Preliminary Human Safety Assessment (PHSA) for the Improvement of the Behavioral Aspects of Safety Climate in the Construction Industry

“…Behavior-based safety has also been analyzed by means of a system dynamics approach in order to highlight the feedback effects of such a model [35]. Wu et al [36] developed a stress scale for construction workers, establishing a correlation between the dimensions of job stress and those of safety behavior. Nevertheless, these types of analyses can be time-consuming, as they require a sufficient monitoring period, as well as resource consumption due to the need for specialists for the analysis of results, making their implementation by small-sized companies difficult [23].…”

<p>Investigating the Effects of Role Demands, Psychosocial Stress Symptoms and Safety Leadership on Mineworkers’ Safety Performance</p>

“…8,9,32 Previous studies suggest that roles full of conflicts and ambiguity will reduce employees' desire to follow standard operating procedures and this can negatively influence their behaviour towards safety compliance and participation. 9,33 In the work of Wu, Li, 10 evidence was found for role management to negatively relate to safety performance, hence concluded that an employee with little information about his or her work and undefined roles will suffer from role comprehension thereby, choosing which safety procedure to comply with will be a challenge. Also, when employees receive different job requirements or assigned different positions at the same time, the tendency of such employees using short-cuts to perform their roles may be high and therefore can compromise workplace safety.…”

“…Sampson, DeArmond 9 later termed them as safety role uncertainty since they were perceived to be detrimental to safety performance (safety compliance and safety participation) in construction companies. Wu, Li 10 referred to them as role management and defined role management as "the job stress generated by the uncertainty of one's job responsibilities or conflict due to different job requirements". For the sake of this current study, we prefer to refer to role stressors or safety role uncertainties or role management as role demands for the sake of employees on the mine site.…”

Exploring the Impact of Unsafe Behaviors on Building Construction Accidents Using a Bayesian Network

“…For example, the organizational factors such as the safety climate [15] and group norms [16] were identified as the important contributors to the workers' unsafe behavior, and also the influence of critical managerial roles in an organization, such as the supervisors, was also highlighted in multiple studies [17,18]. Some researchers devoted their efforts into investigating the frontline workers' behavior from various perspectives, including the workers' physical effects [19], psychological conditions [20,21] and cognitive process [22,23]. However, on the other hand, compared with the fact that the unsafe-behavior is profiled from various perspectives at different levels, another core part of the fundamental Heinrich theory, namely, the statistical association between unsafe behavior and accidents was somehow ignored [10,24].…”