Impact of Resilience Engineering on Physical Symptoms of Construction Workers

Physical symptoms plague construction workers and pose threats to safety performance and productivity. Following the resilience engineering (RE) principles, recent construction safety management practices enhance construction workers’ safety capability and safety management system resilience. This paper established an exploratory structural model explaining how construction workers’ safety capability alleviates their physical and psychological symptoms through safety management system resilience. To validate and estimate the structural model, 741 valid responses from construction workers based in Shanghai, China were obtained. Given no established scales for the constructs in the model, a cross-validation procedure, consisting of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis, was performed. The results showed that although neither safety capability nor safety management system resilience has direct negative impacts on physical symptoms, they can reduce physical symptoms via alleviating psychological symptoms. Furthermore, safety capability can reduce psychological and physical symptoms via safety management system resilience. This paper therefore suggests that cultivating construction workers’ safety capability would be the first step in implementing resilience engineering principles in construction. The continuous implementation of cost-effective and tailored resilience training programs are suggested to enhance construction workers’ safety capability. Safety management systems are suggested to improve with the fostering of a just culture and emerging technologies.