The Influence Of Leader-based Verbal Communication On Jobsite Unsafe Behaviors

As China is a country under transition and its high population density,construction development became extremely important for sustaining the growingdemands. Nonetheless, workers’ safety performance in the Chinese constructionindustry is poor compared to other countries. A large number of construction workerswere migrated from rural areas of China, common traits of this group of people tend tohave low literacy levels and low skilled. And it is problematic in safety management toachieve “Zero Accident”.In order to identify the impact of communication on unsafe behaviors throughcognitive failure, the research utilized the Input-Process-Output (I-P-O) model todelineate the associations among the group of variables. Experience sampling method(ESM) and work sampling approach were adopted for data collection. Communicationand cognitive data were collected from89workers from two jobsites, and the data oftheir safety behaviors onsite.The results show that by understanding the fundamental causes of workers’unsafe behaviors may assist supervisors to manage workers more effectively. Theresults of the experiment found supervisors’ verbal communication styles were likely toaffect workers’ safety cognition as it may lead to their onsite safety behaviors. Thisthesis has conducted an experiment to two construction sites in China; the design of theexperiment was based on literature reviews and interviews with field experts. The mainfocuses of the experiment includes:1) Mapping the connections of leader-based verbalcommunication, workers’ safety cognition and their safety behaviors onsite; and,2)using case study approach to validate the connections discovered quantitatively.This study concludes that leader-based verbal communication was havingimpact on the workers safety behaviors. The intensity of verbal communication by thesupervisors from the two groups was very similar, but workers’ safety performance washigher in one of the sampled group. The results indicated the workers’ safety awarenesswas likely to be influenced by their supervisor’s communication styles. In theperspective of cognitive engineering, by adopting suitable communication styles to the work groups may improve workers’ safety cognition which may decrease risks ofperforming unsafe behaviors.