Systems thinking is a philosophy currently prevalent within construction safety literature that is applied to understand and improve safety in sociotechnical systems. Among systems, the site-project organizational system is of particular interest to this paper. Using focus group and survey feedback research to learn about how safety incidents effect levels of construction workers engagement this paper reveals how a safety incident provides an opportunity to create a potential quality (productivity) upgrade within an organization. The research approach involved a qualitative study involving 27 frontline supervisors and a follow-up survey completed by 207 frontline workers in the Australian Asphalt and Pavement Industry. The focus group interviews supported the articulation of the concepts of tacit safety, explicit safety, situational awareness, foresight ability, practical intelligence and crew synergy. Our findings indicate that having regular shift changes and other job site workers being fatigued are influential on perceptions of tacit safety. An individual's foresight ability was found to be the most potent predictor of worker perceptions of work engagement. The paper explains that relatively small improvements in worker perceptions of safety can bring about significant improvements in employee engagement and productivity.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 1. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 08 December 2015.
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#21,721,962
of 27,515,430 outputs
Outputs from Accident Analysis & Prevention
#3,162
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Outputs of similar age
#283,182
of 399,826 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Accident Analysis & Prevention
#50
of 89 outputs
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