While safety improvements have been made in the construction industry, construction still experiences one of the highest numbers of fatalities annually compared to other industries in the United States with over 970 fatalities in 2016 alone. This number of fatalities drives researchers and safety managers to improve safety measures and practices, and to gain a better understanding of why accidents happen. One of the main hurdles facing safety managers across the United States is workers’ risk taking.
While risk perception and risk taking have been studied extensively in construction, there is a general lack of research that factors in the impact of risk taking or the biases in risk perception. Most prior studies have considered workers’ risk perception of the hazards present in their work as an accurate assessment of safety risk. Biases in risk perception were rarely examined. Furthermore, the factors influencing workers’ risk perception were often studied individually. While that approach might provide an explanation of the impact of a certain factor (e.g., the amount and quality of training) on safety risk perception, this approach often fails to examine the bigger picture and does not give a clear transition for the implications of that single factor on overall risk taking. Therefore, a need for a holistic approach directed at a worker’s risk taking has risen. This study addresses this knowledge gap by conducting an all-inclusive approach to safety risk perception, the factors influencing it, and how it impacts a worker’s decision making.
By conducting a very detailed literature review in construction safety, occupational safety, and decision-making literature, the main factors influencing perception and risk aking were highlighted. This study utilized multiple forms of data collection, both at the national level and at the state level, to conduct the various analyses that were carried out in the research. Throughout the four manuscripts of this dissertation, new and unstudied biases in workers’ risk perception are presented and discussed, occupational rewards are defined, the connections between the perception of risk and reward are established, and the implications of all of those issues on worker’s risk taking are investigated and outlined.
The findings of this study indicate that workers’ risk perception is influenced by many factors that have not been examined in prior studies. Workers were found to assess the same risk differently depending on the person that might be impacted by that risk. This bias has not previously been studied in construction safety research. Furthermore, this study presents a modern definition of occupational rewards that reflects what workers perceive as being a reward in their job. The study also presents the perceived rewards as indicated by the construction workers in four different categories (financial, developmental, social, and personal) and illustrates the impact of the rewards on attracting new workers to the industry, as well as retaining and motivating the existing workforce. The study also establishes the presence of a connection between the perceptions of risk and reward in construction workers’ assessment even though workers failed to directly identify the connection. Finally, the study utilized a mixed-methods approach to examine construction workers’ risk taking that took into consideration multiple factors highlighted throughout the previous steps. The findings of this study provide the foundation for future research in this field, and can have a great impact on improving safety outcomes in practice if addressed properly in a company’s safety plan
