Perceiving interactions and dynamics of safety leadership in construction projects

This paper develops a Structural Equation Model (SEM) based approach to identify roles of leadership in managing construction safety performance in a changing project environment. A model consisting of 5 latent variables and 26 observed variables is established to reveal relationships between different stakeholders’ leaderships and construction safety performance according to a survey of 464 valid respondents. The built model is verified through several tests, including common method bias test, hypothesis test, multiple group invariance test, and goodness-of-fit tests. Impacts of path coefficient, stakeholder participation, and construction process dynamics on construction safety performance are investigated and analyzed in detail. Results indicate that: (i) At the pre-construction phase, the owner party has a strongest total effect on managing construction safety performance; (ii) At the construction phase, the contractor party plays a dominant role in managing construction safety performance associated with a highest value in both total and direct effects; and (iii) The role of the indirect effect that participating stakeholders play on construction safety performance becomes weakened as the project gradually steps from pre-construction into construction phase. The novelty of the developed approach lies in its capabilities in (a) perceiving causal relationships among stakeholders from survey data, (b) identifying leading roles on managing construction safety performance, and (c) revealing the transfer of duty and responsibility within different stakeholders as the construction advances. The research findings can assist to allocate the duty on construction safety management among different stakeholders and further facilitate the enhancement of safety performance in the construction industry.