Project team social capital, safety behaviors, and performance: A multi-level conceptual framework

The current Hong Kong construction industry safety state of affairs are undesirable. While a myriad of safety approaches have been adopted in the industry through normative compliance, error prevention, and climate intervention, the situations remain dismal. One of the reasons for the ineffectiveness of these approaches to ensure construction projects’ safety performance is the mismatch between the approaches’ rigid and static formulations of construction operations that are put to use in the operations that are emergent and dynamic. We propose that the deficiency can be rectified through the project team adaptive inputs and interactions that are grounded in the project team social capital. We (1) explore such possibility by establishing the theoretical underpinning through extant literature and (2) propose a conceptual framework befitting a relational approach to ensuring project safety outcomes. To accomplish the objectives set forth above, we conduct literature search and review in the domains of social capital, construction safety, social psychology, and small team research. Through the process of convergent and refinement of the literary domains, we put forth a conceptual framework that can be put into empirical test. The framework reveals that project team social capital can be modeled as a multi-level phenomenon emanating from individual level network structure. These structural features, together with the relational and cognitive features at the group level, influence the individual safety behaviors, and in turn, their safety outcomes. The analysis through literature review and modeling have shown that project team members’ safety behaviors are influenced by the interaction of both the individual and group level relational phenomena. This study enriches current safety research agenda by highlighting the effects of team dynamics in safety performance. In this respect, we also provide methodological suggestions to empirically test the framework.