The Influence of Personal and Workplace Characteristics on the Job Stressors of Design Professionals in the Chinese Construction Industry

Rapid growth in the Chinese construction industry is exposing many design professionals to elevated stress levels with negative implications for their health and well-being, and in-turn project outcomes. However, it is surprising that there has been little research into job stressors affecting design professionals in the construction industry. The aim of this paper is to help address this gap in knowledge by reporting the results of research that explored the job stressors of design professionals and how they vary across various personal and workplace characteristics. Data was collected via a survey of 408 design professionals in the Chinese construction industry, supported by in-depth sensemaking interviews with nine Chinese design professionals. Survey data was analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics combined with qualitative analysis of interview transcripts. Results indicate that task-related stressors are the leading sources of job stress for design professionals in the industry. Managing job workload, job requirements, and job ambiguity are the main task-related stressors and are linked to time pressures, working overtime, high workload, balancing multiple projects, and high levels of responsibility. Results also indicate that gender, marital status, age, education background, years of design experience, design discipline, position, and professional title are mediating factors in a design professional's job stressor profile. Being the first large-scale empirical investigation of the job stressors among design professionals in the Chinese construction industry, the findings provide new empirical and conceptual insights into an increasingly important yet under researched problem and concludes with practical recommendations to reduce job stress for design professionals in the industry, which has broader relevance in other countries

Framework for Promoting Women's Career Development across Career Stages in the Construction Industry

Despite efforts to promote gender diversity, the construction industry in Australia remains one of the most male-dominated industries. Women, compared to their male counterparts, progress more slowly and encounter major obstacles to career development in the construction industry. Existing research tends to focus on broad factors that impact women's career development in all career stages despite the fact that women's career priorities often change as they progress through different career stages. This study applied Super's career development model to investigate the influential factors on women's career development across four career stages: explore (precareer), establishment (early career), midcareer, and late career. By conducting a systematic review in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines, this research identified influential factors related to women's career development in the construction industry, namely, attitude, capability, interest, past experiences, family responsibilities, parental influences, role models, support, culture, organizational practice, and policies and regulations. Based on the women's empowerment framework, the identified factors were coded and synthesized into three dimensions: individual, relational, and environmental. The research finds there is a significant focus on providing relational and environmental support to women in construction, and less attention is given to individual factors. The review revealed that personal interest and parental perceptions in construction influence women's career development in precareer and early career stages, while masculine culture significantly impacts women's career development in all career stages. This study also summarizes the theoretical contributions and practical implications drawn from existing research on different stages of women's career development and provides guidance for further research

Identifying Leadership Competencies for Construction 4.0

With the development of the times, the challenge of the construction industry entering Construction 4.0 and surviving in it is still formidable. Although many studies state the importance of effective leadership in the context of Construction 4.0, there is a need to investigate what leadership qualities can eectively provide guidance on leading construction organisations in this era. Through a focused review, this study aims to propose a series of key leadership competencies in the context of Construction 4.0 for guiding the digital transformation and the development of leaders in construction organisations, as well as complementing the existing Construction 4.0 research gap in organisational management. Through in-depth analysis of the retrieved literature, this research extracted and analysed 22 leadership competencies, classified them into four top-level themes (cognition, interpersonal communication, business, and strategy), and discussed the potential relationships among them. Theoretically, the article provides the basis and guidance for future leadership research by redefining and explaining the meaning of each competency. In practice, the paper provides construction industry practitioners with guidance on the development of effective leadership in the era of Construction 4.0

Prioritizing Safety Climate Improvements in the Indonesian Construction Industry Using Supervised Classification

Despite its significance, the Indonesian construction industry has poor safety performance. Improving the safety climate has been seen as a way to improve safety in the industry. Research on safety climate in this context has identified a range of safety climate factors that require improvements. However, construction organizations face difficulties in implementing improvement recommendations due to resource constraints. In order to help construction organizations in their efforts to improve the safety climate, this research demonstrates the use of supervised classification approaches to identify specific safety climate factors that construction organizations should focus on. Data were collected from 311 construction practitioners in Indonesia using a 22-item safety climate survey. Supervised classification methods, comprising ensemble methods, Support Vector Machine, Naive Bayes, and Nearest Neighbor, were used. The analysis identified 14 safety climate items that can represent the original dataset with high accuracy (93%). These 14 items can be considered crucial items that should be prioritized in the Indonesian construction industry. These items revealed that, due to the high power distance culture in Indonesia, top-down approaches, such as giving clear instructions, providing training, and reminding people often about safety, are effective for engaging employees to focus on and participate in safety. The findings also suggest that understanding cultural context is important to determine effective strategies to improve safety. This research has also demonstrated the potential application of supervised classification approaches to help decision makers improve safety by focusing on crucial factors within a context

Influence of Prefabricated Construction on the Mental Health of Workers: Systematic Review

Despite the significant contribution of the construction industry to national and global economies, the risk it poses to the health and safety of its workers is concerning. With substantial improvement in physical health and safety performance, especially in industrialised and developed economies, attention has shifted to the mental health of construction workers. The construction industry has implemented several worker-focused and management-oriented intervention programs, but problems related to poor mental health persist, and the industry ranks high in suicide figures. Entering the Construction 4.0 era, the use of technologies and new construction methods have been touted to have the potential to improve mental wellbeing. Therefore, this research addresses this lingering problem by: (1) identifying and classifying stressors of mental health and (2) assessing the relevance of adopting prefabricated construction to improving mental health. A two-phased PRISMA-guided systematic review was conducted due to the nonavailability of past studies that combine the concepts of prefabrication and mental health. Mental health stressors were grouped into three categories, with industry-related identified as having an influence on management/organisational and personal stressors. Prefabricated construction, on the other hand, by virtue of its benefits over traditional construction, is found to be capable of eliminating, or at least reducing, the impact of industry-related stressors and, by extension, promoting good mental health

Health and Safety Integration into the Procurement Stages of Public Construction Projects in Developing Countries: A Case of Ghana

The potential to promote health and safety (H&S) through public procurement has resulted in increased expectation for public sector clients to integrate H&S matters into their procurement decisions and practices. Developing countries are however far behind in this endeavour. Using qualitative research, therefore, this study explored how public clients integrate H&S into the procurement of public works. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with 20 contractors and public sector clients who have vast experience in the procurement of public works. The data was analysed using both inductive and deductive thematic analyses. The findings show that the extent of H&S integration into the procurement process depended on the funding source(s) for public projects. H&S matters are generally overlooked in the various procurement stages for public projects funded by the government, while in those funded by international development agencies, H&S matters are prioritized, and therefore, given considerable attention. The research contributes to construction H&S improvement research in developing countries by giving insight into the extent of H&S integration into public procurement. It also contributes to the understanding of the influence of funding sources on the extent to which H&S matters are integrated into public procurement in developing countries

Domains of Psychosocial Risk Factors Affecting Young Construction Workers: A Systematic Review

Despite being a key provider of employment, construction work significantly contributes to poor mental health among young construction workers worldwide. Although there are studies on the psychosocial risk factors (PRFs) that make young construction workers susceptible to poor mental health, the literature is fragmented. This has obscured a deeper understanding of PRFs and the direction for future research, thus making it challenging to develop appropriate interventions. To address this challenge, we systematically reviewed the literature on young construction workers’ PRFs using meta-aggregation, guided by the PICo, PEO, and PRISMA frameworks. We sought to synthesize the domains of PRFs that affect young construction workers’ mental health, and to determine the relationships between the PRF domains, psychological distress, and poor mental health. A total of 235 studies were retrieved and 31 studies published between 1993 and 2020 met the inclusion criteria. We identified 30 PRFs and categorized them into ten domains, which were further classified into personal, socio-economic, and organizational/industrial factors. The findings of this review contribute to achieving an in-depth understanding of young construction workers’ PRF domains and their patterns of interaction. The findings are also useful to researchers and policymakers for identifying PRFs that are in critical need of attention

Influence of Safety Climate on Safety Performance in Gas Stations in Indonesia

Accidents in gas stations may cause injury or even death to people. Moreover, an accident in a gas station might halt its operation for some time. When an accident takes place in a region with scant amount of gas stations, it may lead to fuel scarcity in the area, affecting the economy and sparking other issues. Therefore, safety climate and safety performance in gas stations need to be evaluated. Safety climate has been used as a tool to assess the safety performance of an organization at a given time. The aim of this study was to understand the influence of safety climate on safety performance in gas stations in Indonesia. A total of 129 gas stations were selected. To assess safety climate, a safety climate questionnaire was used, while the safety performance was captured by conducting on site structured observations. The assessment shows that gas stations have a good level of safety climate, especially when it is compared with other industrial sectors in Indonesia, such as construction. The study findings also show that safety climate has a significant positive impact on safety performance. Three safety climate dimensions with significant positive influence on safety performance are management commitment, communication, and personal accountability. Therefore, improvement efforts should focus more on these dimensions to boost safety performance in gas stations

Assessing Safety Risk Management Performance in Chinese Subway Construction Projects: A Multistakeholder Perspective

The rapid development of subway projects in China presents significant safety risks to those involved. Building on the previous empirical research that identified and classified the safety risks of these projects, the aim of this paper is to assess the safety risk management performance in Chinese subway construction projects from a multistakeholder perspective. Questionnaire surveys and semistructured interviews were conducted with three hundred and ninety-nine and eight construction professionals, respectively, who worked on subway construction projects in southeast China. The results indicate that the top five areas of safety risk management performance are related to construction plan development, management of high-risk construction works, hazard identification and communication, government-related factors, and client-related factors. In contrast, the bottom five areas of safety risk management performance are related to engineering consultant-related factors, the site's natural environment and weather conditions, regular tests, machine calibration and maintenance, site construction schedule, and construction preparedness. The relationship between this safety risk management performance and the perceived importance of each risk factor is also reported, identifying priority areas for improvements on these projects. These findings contribute new conceptual insights to the paucity of research on the safety risk management performance of Chinese subway construction projects from a multistakeholder perspective. The results also provide new practical insights for policymakers and project managers to help them develop more effective and focused strategies to further improve the safety performance of these major projects

Contributions of safety critical success factors and safety program elements to overall project success

Implementing a safety program is an essential step toward improving safety performance. This research aims to develop an overall project success (OPS) model for building projects through investigating the direct and indirect impact of safety critical success factors (CSFs) on OPS mediated by safety program elements. First, interviews were carried out with experts in the Iraqi construction industry, and then a questionnaire survey was utilized to obtain feedback from construction professionals. The results revealed that 20 elements are needed to confirm and improve effectiveness. These elements were categorized into four constructs: management commitment and employee involvement, worksite analysis, hazard and prevention control, and health and safety training. The analysis confirms that the relationship between safety CSFs and OPS are mediated by safety program elements. These findings offer a glimmer of hope for implementing safety programs in the Iraqi construction sector, and can also be used to enhance safety performance