Project Site Leadership Role in Improving Construction Safety

RT-256 was formed to study the following essential question: “What is the relationship between the leadership behaviors of site leadership personnel and project safety performance?” To do this, the team collected data from 31 CII member-company projects regarding leaders’ values, priorities, behaviors, and safety performance using the following safety leadership model.

The team defined nine Leader Safety Values, six Leader Behaviors, and six Site Safety Climate indicators. Data on these were collected through questionnaires obtained from over 3200 individuals across the supervisory hierarchy on the 31 projects using a 360° assessment approach. Recordable Injury Rate and Lost Time Incident Rate were used to define each project’s site safety performance.

RT-256 was not able to establish statistically significant answers to the essential question, in part because each of the 31 projects had superior safety performance. Nevertheless, RT-256 was able to extract other findings of value from the data.

One key conclusion reached by RT-256 is that the relationship between leader behavior and project safety performance is more complex than the initial safety leadership model depicts. Specifically, worker behaviors – both compliance and “citizenship” behavior – need to be included in the model, which RT-256 recommends be used as the basis for any future research into this topic.