An Investigation into Safety Culture of Chinese Construction Supervision Organizations

To prevent casualties from happening and reduce injures, the State Council of China issued Production Safety Regulation on Construction Projects (PSRCP), which set out safety responsibilities of each party in construction project. On-site supervising engineers (who have similar roles to the Engineer in FIDIC Conditions of Contract for Construction), had also been assigned legal responsibility in regard to safety performance according to that regulation. Safety culture is proposed as an effective way to improve safety management performance. However, safety culture needs to be understood, evaluated, developed and fostered. The paper firstly developed a safety culture framework, then, 15 construction sites were surveyed based on the questionnaire designed from the framework. The survey results were analyzed using Factor Analysis with SPSS software. The analysis results show that individual safety consciousness of supervising engineers is good and Construction Supervision Organizations also pays great attention to the safety supervision. The main implications of the research findings are supervising engineers should improve their professional knowledge, the communication skill and apply risk management into their safety management practice. In the meantime, negative influences from the clients and contractors should be paid attention because it is a serious obstacle which deters the effective safety management of supervising engineers.