Optimizing Safety Investments for Building Projects in Singapore

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

A maturity model for resilient safety culture development in construction companies

A resilient safety culture is characterized by the capability of addressing the changing and unforeseen safety risks associated with the increasingly complex nature of sociotechnical systems, and creating an ultrasafe organization. An assessment of the maturation of resilient safety culture helps organizations to evaluate their capabilities of managing safety risks and achieving a consistently high safety performance. This study aims to present a maturity model developed to measure and improve resilient safety culture in the construction environment. The research was conducted in two stages. The first stage consisted of a review of the literature on the concepts of a resilient safety culture and the capability maturity model for the development of a maturity model. In the second stage, the developed model was evaluated using the Delphi technique. The model defines five maturity levels that can be used to measure resilient safety culture of a construction organization. It presents a set of descriptions of 19 aspects of resilient safety culture at each maturity level. The assessment procedure and the way of using the model are further discussed. Theoretically, this study provides insights into the maturity characteristics of a resilient safety culture. In practical terms, it offers guidance for benchmarking and encouraging the enhancement of organizations’ capabilities to manage safety risks

Construction workplace trends and work health and safety

Construction workplaces are experiencing rapid changes as a result of digitalization, globalization, industrialization, and sustainability. The workplace changes have a significant impact on the ways that people work, the environments that they work in, and the conditions under which they perform their everyday job activities. This Special Issue was motivated by the need to understand and explore how the trends and changes within construction workplaces, such as technological innovations, sustainability, organizational resilience, offsite construction, cultural and demographic diversity, influence or shape the work health and safety (WHS) management and practices in the construction industry. This Special Issue collected six articles that addressed different aspects of construction workplace trends and evaluated their impacts on WHS practices and performance

Theorizing to improve mental health in multicultural construction industries : an intercultural coping model

Construction workers are exposed to a range of stressors that lead to mental ill-health. In a multicultural construction workplace, the interactions between workers with different cultural backgrounds may aggravate mental health issues. Existing studies on coping typically focus on a reactive approach to managing stressors in the absence of cultural-related factors. This approach is inadequate in addressing mental health issues in a culturally diverse construction workplace. This paper presents a critical review that synthesizes and analyses theories and models of stress and coping, proactive coping, occupational stress, acculturative stress, and intercultural competence to develop a conceptual model for managing mental health in a multicultural construction workforce. The proposed model relies upon a positive coping mechanism, i.e., intercultural coping, to manage stressful events during the entire coping process in a multicultural workplace, towards achieving sustained good mental health. The proposed conceptual model contributes to the development of coping theories and positive psychology approaches and provides effective coping strategies to enhance psychological well-being in a multicultural context

Evaluating the COVID-19 impacts on sustainable procurement : experiences from the Australian built environment sector

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought global economies to a standstill and created challenges for a variety of sectors, including housing, building and infrastructure. Many business and government organisations have experienced some form of supply chain disruption—either through suppliers going offline, a sudden spike in demand or both. While embedding sustain-ability in procurement is a powerful tool for bringing about positive change in an organisation’s supply chains, this global pandemic has had a myriad of impacts on these procurement processes. Through focus group discussions with industrial practitioners and government decision makers from the Australian built environment sector, this study presents their lived experiences related to COVID-19 impacts on sustainable procurement. The emergent themes are: (1) the effects of COVID-19 on sustainable procurement, (2) the rapid development of reactive procurement responses and (3) levers for post-COVID-19 sustainable procurement. In order to learn from the challenges related to COVID-19, both government and industry need to re-assess their supply chain risks and determine the supply chain design that will deliver the most resiliency in the event of another large-scale disruption. There are several key levers, including developing reliable, trans-parent and local supply chains, leveraging innovative tools and digital engineering approaches, creating a coalition between government and industry and assessing risks at multiple levels. This study is the first of its kind to evaluate the COVID-19 impacts on sustainable procurement in the Australian building and construction industries. Government and industry practitioners can immediately apply these actionable recommendations to overcome the impacts of the pandemic and other disruptions on sustainable procurement activities

Stressors in the multicultural construction working environment

Due to the dynamic and complex nature of the construction industry, construction workers are often exposed to a range of stressors which are causative factors for mental health problems. Simultaneously, intercultural contact between workers in a multicultural working environment may aggravate mental health issues. A better understanding of stressors can contribute to the development of targeted measures for mental health prevention and promotion. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the correlation between stressors and mental health for construction workers in a culturally diverse working environment. Data were collected using questionnaires from 252 construction workers in Australia. The Pearson correlation analysis was used to analyse the collected data. The results revealed the significant correlations between stressors and mental health outcomes and indicated the most significant stressors from work, personal and cultural domains. The findings provide valuable insights for practitioners and policymakers on the development of mental health interventions for construction workforce in a multicultural context. Researchers could also benefit from an in-depth comprehension on the causative factors of psychological issues in the construction industry

Coping strategies for work and cultural stressors in multicultural construction workplaces : a study in Australia

Existing coping theories typically position coping as a reactive approach to managing mental health. Intercultural coping was proposed to positively deal with stressors and alleviate the negative impacts of stressors on mental health outcomes in multicultural workplaces. This study aims to investigate the role of intercultural coping strategies in influencing the relationships between stressors and mental health outcomes in multicultural construction workplaces. Data were collected from 252 construction workers in Australia using online questionnaire survey. Data were analysed using the structural equation modelling (SEM) technique. The results revealed the moderating effect of positive coping strategies on the stressor-psychological outcome relationship. A worker who is open to cultural dissimilarity tends to suffer less the adverse effect of cultural stressors on mental health. A worker with cognitive complexity is less susceptible to the adverse impact of work stressors on mental health. Whereas, a worker who is performance-oriented is more vulnerable to the impact of work stressors on mental health. This study may contribute to the existing body of work by uncovering the moderating role of positive coping strategies and providing targeted and effective coping strategies in multicultural construction workplaces

Model-Free Algorithm with Improved Sample Efficiency for Zero-Sum Markov Games

The problem of two-player zero-sum Markov games has recently attracted increasing interests in theoretical studies of multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL). In particular, for finite-horizon episodic Markov decision processes (MDPs), it has been shown that model-based algorithms can find an $\epsilon$-optimal Nash Equilibrium (NE) with the sample complexity of $O(H^3SAB/\epsilon^2)$, which is optimal in the dependence of the horizon $H$ and the number of states $S$ (where $A$ and $B$ denote the number of actions of the two players, respectively). However, none of the existing model-free algorithms can achieve such an optimality. In this work, we propose a model-free stage-based Q-learning algorithm and show that it achieves the same sample complexity as the best model-based algorithm, and hence for the first time demonstrate that model-free algorithms can enjoy the same optimality in the $H$ dependence as model-based algorithms. The main improvement of the dependency on $H$ arises by leveraging the popular variance reduction technique based on the reference-advantage decomposition previously used only for single-agent RL. However, such a technique relies on a critical monotonicity property of the value function, which does not hold in Markov games due to the update of the policy via the coarse correlated equilibrium (CCE) oracle. Thus, to extend such a technique to Markov games, our algorithm features a key novel design of updating the reference value functions as the pair of optimistic and pessimistic value functions whose value difference is the smallest in the history in order to achieve the desired improvement in the sample efficiency

Effect of Organizational Cultural Differences and Mutual Trust on Contract Management of Nonequity Construction Project Alliances

This study aims to examine the impact of organizational cultural difference and mutual trust on the contract management of nonequity project alliances in the construction industry. A questionnaire survey was conducted to collect the quantitative data for this study. The relationships between the variables were analyzed using hierarchical regression analysis. It was found that the contractual complexity of nonequity project alliances was impacted by the differences in management style, differences in organizational responsiveness, mutual goodwill trust, and mutual competence trust. It was also found that the relationship between differences in organizational responsiveness and contractual complexity was moderated by mutual goodwill trust. The research may provide theoretical basis for the management when making decisions on the selection of project alliance partners and contracts. The findings imply that when the firms seek to form project alliances, they need to recognize the level of organizational cultural differences and then determine the proper contractual complexity of the project alliance. In addition, the establishment of mutual goodwill trust between alliance partners will not only reduce the costs of making contracts but also the costs of implementing the contracts

The relationship between mindfulness and safety performance of building repair and maintenance : an empirical study in Australia

The importance of building repair and maintenance (R&M) has become more significant in recent years as the volume of building stock has expanded globally. With this growth in building stock coupled with R&M complexity unforeseen safety risks has become an increasing problem to solve. In such complex working environment a type of organisation known as high reliability organisation (HRO) is known to operate successfully. The concept of mindfulness from HRO theory has been identified as a key strategy for addressing unforeseen risks derived from the complexity in socio-technical systems. Therefore, this study aims to examine the relationship between mindfulness and safety performance of building R&M companies. Initially, a comprehensive literature review was conducted on HROs and the concept of mindfulness to develop the research hypothesis. A questionnaire survey was utilised to collect the data from Australian building R&M professionals. A Pearson correlation analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between mindfulness and safety performance. This study found that mindfulness has a significant impact on accident prevention in building R&M companies through discovering and managing the unexpected events owing to the complexity. The findings have implications for organisations in the way they train and implement professional development programs for their staff