Organizational safety culture and individual safety behavior: A case study of a construction mega project in Medina at Saudi Arabia

International Summit on Industrial Engineering

December 08-10, 2014 DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel San Francisco Airport, USA

Omar Alrehaili

YRF: Ind Eng Manage

Abstract :

Accidents related to human errors have destructive impacts on the safety and well being of the work environment. These impacts include extreme costs of handling unsafe issues, economic vulnerabilities and loss of lives. The construction industry is known to have one of the highest injuries and accidents rate compared to other workplaces. Investigation and enhancement of the current practices and processes in construction sites are urgently needed to promote a safety culture especially in developing countries. It is known in literature that Saudi Arabia has one the highest injuries and accidents rates in the construction sites. Evaluation of the construction sites in Saudi Arabia from the perspective of investigating safety culture is hardly addressed in the literature. Safety culture reflects the safety practices and management in the organizations and it has been considered to impact worker behavior positively or negatively. This study aims to examine the establishment of organizational safety culture and its impacts on the workers? safety behaviors within the construction environment in King Abdullah Mega-project for expansion of the holy city of Medina in Saudi Arabia. Organizational safety culture is measured and explored using combination of safety climate multiple aspects tool and the employment of theory of planned behavior model to assess employee behaviors. This paper helps to explain the human safety behavior variations in accordance to organizational safety culture in a diverse ethnic and demographic construction environment.

Biography :

Omar Alrehaili is a doctoral student at the department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems at University of Central Florida (UCF). He received his Master degree in Industrial Engineering from University of South Florida (USF) in 2014. He has five years? experience working as a project engineer on various constructions and operational projects. His main research interests include: Safety Culture, Human Factors, Applied Psychology and Engineering Management.