چكيده لاتين :
Background and aims: Construction industry is known as one of the most perilous industries in that it
is involving the hazardous projects as well as the high manpower activities correlating with a high rate of
work-related accidents. On the other hand, the high rate of accidents in the industry demanding a big
budget for the damages; therefore, safety is strongly emphasized in the construction industry projects.
Iran holds 15th rank in the world’s rank in terms of electricity generation and as a developing country
needs to boost its electricity production by about five percent annually. On the other hand, some factors
indicate the necessities of a focus on promoting safety and a safety culture in these projects; the risky
nature of power plant construction, the increment in the number of contracting companies, the size of
projects and the complexity of work procedures, and the natural outsourcing of activities, to name but a
few.
The accidents of the construction industry caused by a variety of causes are generally categorized into
two groups, those which are caused by dangerous situations or physics and ones with the reason
correlated to the unsafe behaviors or the actions. Accordingly, many studies have focused on the
behavior of individuals as one of the first-line factor of accidents, and it is believed that fostering an
appropriate safety culture in the organization and individuals is a crucial strategy lessening the workrelated
accidents. The safety culture of an organization is the product of group and individual values,
perspectives, anticipations, adequacies, and behavior patterns that ascertain the extent of their
commitment to the organization proficiency, health style, and safety management. In general, the
organizations with a strong safety culture which are gradually enhancing by time effectively prevent
from individual and organizational disasters. According to several studies, there are disparate factors
affecting the safety culture of the organization and the individuals. Given to the results of numerous
studies, the safety investment in the projects has an impact on the safety culture and the safety
performance. However, the degree of influence of each safety factor on the culture improvement is not
assessed in the previous studies. Furthermore, it is necessary to recognize the effective type of
investment impacting on the enhancement of the safety culture, in that the amount of safety investment
in each project and the contracting company has limitations. The present study aimed at evaluating the
impact of various safety investment methods on improving safety culture in the construction industry
projects and for this reason we investigate the thermal power plant projects.
Methods: The current study inspecting the interactive effects of safety investment factors embodying
the cost of safety training, the safety incentives, the safety personnel and the safety equipment on the
safety culture in the power plant construction projects in Iran. The Structural Equation Modeling (SEM)
method explores the interactive effects of various types of safety investments on the safety culture. The
SEM as a multivariate method helps us to simultaneously investigate the relationship between
independent and dependent structures in a theoretical model. The SEM is one of the most useful
techniques analyzing the relationships between variables. Although variables are probably hypothetical
or invisible (hidden variables), this method can specify complex relationships between variables.
Among different types of SEM method, the Partial Least Squares SEM (PLS-SEM) method was selected
for this study since the data of the study were abnormal and abnormal data can be analyzed using PLS
method. Additionally, the PLS method does not require a big sample size and it can compute the hidden
structures in the small statistical population by linearly combining the observable variables through their
weight relations. The PLS method can also be used both to evaluate hidden (or dependent) variables
measured by observed variables (or indices) and to evaluate the relationship between variables (i.e., path
coefficients of hypotheses). The software used in this study is Smart PLS Version 2.0.M3.
To achieve the objectives of the research, a conceptual model with four hypothetical paths was presented
to investigate the impact of different types of investment methods on safety and ten indicators were used
to evaluate the safety culture. The four hypotheses of this study including 1- Cost for safety training has
a significant impact on the safety culture 2- Cost for promoting safety and incentives has a significant
impact on the safety culture 3- Cost for safety personnel has a significant impact on the safety culture 4-Costs for safety equipment have a significant impact on the safety culture.
Structured questionnaire was used to collect data needed to evaluate the safety culture measurement
model and safety investment. The statistical population is the contracting companies involved in the
construction of gas, steam and combined cycle power plants to collect the required data. In order to
collect the required research information, we made a connection with the project manager of 28 power
plant projects, 19 of which participated in the study through which we receive the questionnaires from
62 specialized contractors. Having utilized the data collected from power plant construction projects, the
proposed model was empirically tested using the SEM-PLS method and it was determined which
method had a significant impact on improving the safety culture.
Results: According to the results of data analysis in this study, the factor analysis of all questions for
assessing the indices of the safety culture is between 0.6 and 0.9 which is more than 0.4 and indicates
that these criteria are suitable for measuring indicators. Also, the results of the measurement model
parameters have acceptable reliability and validity. The results of the structural model also show that
overall spending on investing in safety improves the safety culture in projects and shows three
hypotheses of impact of cost of training, cost of incentives and cost of safety personnel with the path
coefficients of +0.46, +0.26 and +0.09, respectively. They were confirmed with 95% confidence level.
The path coefficient of +0.46 in the first hypothesis indicates that the investment in the safety training
accounts for 46% of the variation in the safety culture variable. Hence, given the significant amount of
path coefficients for this hypothesis, it can be concluded that increased investment in the safety training
by contractors in power plant construction projects has a significant impact on improving their safety
culture. +0.26 as the amount of the path coefficient of the second hypothesis showed that the costs of
safety incentives in projects has an impact on the safety culture. Considering the path coefficient of
+0.09 for the third hypothesis, which is not a significant amount, it can be concluded that the cost of
safety personnel has a small impact on the safety culture; accordingly, merely compulsory investments
such as costs for safety personnel, have little impact on improving the safety culture. The fourth
hypothesis, namely, the effect of cost of safety equipment on safety culture was not confirmed by t =
1.384 on the bases of significant coefficient. Although this result indicates that the cost of the safety
equipment reduces the accidents, does not directly have an impact on improving the safety culture.
Conclusion: Among the various methods of investing in the safety, the cost of safety training has the
most significant effect on improving the safety culture of contractors, indicating that the safety training
positively improves safety participation, awareness, knowledge, behavior, and motivation. The safety
training directly effects on the safety culture. After the cost of safety training, the cost of safety
incentives and publicity owned the second place in improving the safety culture. The costs for safety
personnel have also been relatively influential on safety culture. The costs for safety equipment have no
impact on improving the safety culture. The costs for safety equipment would be effective in the project
if the safety training be emphasized to improve contractor safety performance. The results of this study
help construction industry contractors to optimize safety culture, therefore, reduce work-related
accidents by optimally spending on the safety.
The first limitation is that the research findings is not generalizable. As mentioned earlier, the culture of
safety varies across different regions and industries. The findings of this research are based on the
information of the construction of power plant projects in Iran and these findings should be interpreted
within this limited context. The current study suffers from the other limitation which is the small sample
size; since there is limited number of power plant projects and the accountability of the contractors is
low. It is worth noting that PLS method, which is the most appropriate method of the structural equation
analysis for the data with small sample size, was utilized to solve this problem. Moreover, this study
merely investigates the impact of four investment methods. In the future for the future studies, by
collecting additional datasets, different factors can be explored in other projects and regions and
presented with separated models.
