Path analysis of attachment in the safety interactions of construction team members
HUANG Yuecheng1, LI Boning1, YU Xiaoxia2, WANG Yao1, FANG Dongping1
1. Department of Construction Management, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China; 2. Center of Publicity and Education, Ministry of Emergency Management of the People's Republic of China, Beijing 100013, China
Abstract：［Objective］ In recent years, the death toll in the construction industry has remained high and unsafe human behavior is the main cause of accidents. The interactions between construction team members have an important impact on workers' unsafe behavior; the safety leadership of the foreman—the most important firstline managers in the construction team—helps to eliminate the unsafe behavior of the workers. However, workers may develop a negative psychological state, such as anxiety and avoidance, during the actual interaction with their foreman, which affects the improvement of safe behaviors during the implementation of safety leadership, and the mechanism remains unclear. ［Methods］ Workers and foremen were selected in this research. We took attachment in the field of developmental psychology as the influencing factor of psychological interaction among individual construction team members and explored its mediating effect between foreman's safety leadership and workers' safety behavior and constructed a theoretical model. Based on the well-established adult attachment assessment scale in psychological research, a worker-foreman attachment scale suited for the construction industry was designed. The scale was modified through a pilot study and confirmatory factor analysis. The reliability and validity of the final scale were relatively ideal. The safety leadership questionnaire and safety behavior questionnaire used to measure the foreman's safety leadership and workers' safety behavior were well-proven mature scales. The empirical data were collected from six construction sites in Beijing, Ningxia, and Hubei in China, and 206 valid samples were finally obtained. Structural equation modeling was constructed using AMOS software, and path analysis was performed. ［Results］ The results show that the foreman's safety leadership has a significant negative impact on workers' attachment avoidance (P<0.001, path coefficient=-0.912). As attachment avoidance negatively influences workers' safety motivation and working habits, it can further negatively affect workers' compliance safety behavior (P<0.001, path coefficient=-0.720) and participation safety behavior (P<0.001, path coefficient=-0.776) as a mediating variable. Workers' attachment anxiety is marginally associated with the foreman's safety leadership in a positive way (P<0.05, path coefficient=0.166), while attachment anxiety is found to have no significant effect on the two dimensions of workers' safety behavior (P>0.05). ［Conclusions］ The results reveal the mediating effect of attachment avoidance between the foreman's safety leadership and workers' safety behaviors. Through the lens of workers' psychological states, several practical suggestions are given on safety leadership to reduce the occurrence of unsafe behaviors from the perspective of reducing workers' attachment avoidance. This study also finds that the overexertion of safety leadership may lead to a worker's anxiety and emotional state, which has an uncertain impact on their safety behaviors; thus, blindly strengthening safety leadership is inappropriate. This research not only illustrates the mechanism of safety leadership from an individual psychological level but also explains the implications of the worker-foreman relationship and highlights the importance of the interaction between construction team members. The effect of safety leadership is two-sided, and hence, safety leadership should be adjusted flexibly in practice according to the actual situation.
黄玥诚, 李泊宁, 郁晓霞, 王尧, 方东平. 依恋关系在施工团队成员安全互动中的作用路径[J]. 清华大学学报（自然科学版）, 2023, 63(2): 169-178.
HUANG Yuecheng, LI Boning, YU Xiaoxia, WANG Yao, FANG Dongping. Path analysis of attachment in the safety interactions of construction team members. Journal of Tsinghua University(Science and Technology), 2023, 63(2): 169-178.
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