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Business interruption ratio (BIR), the ratio of reduced production or service level of a business to the predisaster level when it reopens in the aftermath of a disaster event, is a signifi...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting is gaining importance in the construction industry as an effective tool to communicate social citizenship. Despite the increasing attention o...

Hospitals play a crucial role in providing badly needed medical care after earthquakes. Meanwhile, hospitals are likely to find themselves subject to earthquake impacts and may fail to func...

Behavior-based safety (BBS) methods have been widely reported as an important contributor to the prevention of accidents and improvement of safety performance in construction projects. Howe...

This paper focuses on construction workers’ unsafe behaviors and develops a cognitive model of construction workers’ unsafe behaviors (CM-CWUB). In the construction industry, many accident ...

With ever increasing complexities, construction projects are constantly exposed to a variety of risks associated with all stages of project execution from the initial assessment of strategic options through procurement, fabrication, construction, and commissioning. The successful delivery of construction projects and assurance of project objectives largely depend on the appropriate management of all project risks. One of the major steps in project risk management is to assess the potential risks. It lays the basis for selecting and implementing effective response strategies to mitigate the risks, and avoid undesirable consequences such as project delays and cost overruns. This paper proposes a new approach for risk assessment in construction projects. The approach interprets the subjective risk assessments by experts with a statistical method motivated by a cognitive psychology theory. By considering attributes of risks as random variables, experts as information processing systems, and expert opi...

As a major organizational antecedent of worker safety behavior (WSB), management behavior is drawing more and more academic attention because it tends to be the root cause of occupational safety accidents. The current behavior-based safety (BBS) practices in construction do not sufficiently take management behavior into consideration, which leads to superficial and nonpersistent intervention impacts on unsafe behavior. In academia, the relationship between management behavior and employees’ individual behavior in construction has not been clearly studied and precisely depicted. This paper is aimed at discovering those management behaviors which can significantly impact worker safety behavior in construction projects and depict the exact impacting paths. Supervisors were on the focus because they interact with workers most profoundly and frequently among all levels of the management. Two dimensions of supervisory behavior were identified, namely (1) training and preventive action, and (2) reactive ...

The unsafe behaviors of construction workers are often the immediate causes of construction accidents, but the underlying causation of such behaviors are not well understood. This research regards the management of construction safety as a system, and seeks to use system dynamics to demonstrate how the system influences construction workers in terms of unsafe behaviors. First, individual and environmental conditions that can lead to an unsafe behavior are identified through a holistic cognitive analysis and management conditions that affect such conditions are identified. Second, a system dynamics model for the causation of unsafe behaviors (SD-CUB) is developed to characterize the causal structure of the system. The SD-CUB model involves relationships among management, individuals, and environmental conditions that can eventually lead to workers’ unsafe behaviors. Third, a variety of model tests are conducted to build the confidence of the SD-CUB model. A five-week survey and observation on a bui...

A positive safety climate can improve employees' safety awareness and reduce workers' unsafe behaviors. Having consistent key factors that comprise safety climate is paramount in facilitating the measurement and comparison of safety climate over time which helps identify effective approaches to improve safety performance. This paper examines the consistency of safety climate factor structure and safety climate improvements over time in a Chinese construction company. It adopts a case study approach and reports on using the same safety climate instrument to carry out two surveys, three years apart. The exploratory factor analysis showed that the obtained four-factor structure of safety climate remained consistent across the two surveys. Moreover, the confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that the second-order factor of safety climate was unchanged. Statistically significant improvements were also found on all four identified factors. The governmental or organizational strategies and/or tactics that could stimulate positive improvements on safety climate factors (referred to as stimulators hereinafter) were then identified via interviews with safety management officers in the company. The most effective stimulators were found to include constituting the safety regulations and safety rules, as well as increasing the intensity of safety training and safety promotion. Implications on the consistent factor structure of safety climate and the stimulators are also discussed.

Safety climate can benefit contractors, specialty contractors, and owners of industries by providing them with the knowledge of attitudes and perceptions that can help to consistently achieve better safety performance. The objective of this research was to determine safety climate that would enhance safety culture and positively impact perceived safety performance on construction projects. A safety climate questionnaire survey was conducted on the construction sites of a leading construction company and its subcontractors in Hong Kong. Approximately, 1,500 hard copy questionnaires were distributed and the response rate was excellent, resulting in 1,120 valid questionnaires being collected from 22 construction projects. By means of factor analysis, two underlying safety climate factors were extracted, accounting for 43.9% of the total variance. Multiple regression analysis confirmed that these climate factors, “management commitment and employee involvement” and “inappropriate safety procedure and work pra...

New technologies, new materials, and innovative designs have been extensively adopted in Beijing Olympic venues construction. The extreme requirements for time deadline and competition function expose the venues construction to high risks. These risks would potentially bring negative impacts on the site safety performance. Meanwhile, there is a lack of systematic management for safety risks in China’s construction industry, especially for large projects such as the Beijing Olympic venues construction. This paper identifies and assesses safety risk factors inherent in Beijing Olympic venues construction with the involvement of 27 experienced and highly respected experts from government agencies, the construction industry, and academe through brainstorming, workshop discussions, and questionnaire surveys. The finding reveals that more than half of the critical safety risk factors are from contractors and subcontractors such as: lack of emergency response plan and measures; workers’ unsafe operation, and con...

Safety issues have gained vital importance throughout the construction industry. Many construction companies around the world are implementing safety, health, and environmental management systems to reduce injuries, eliminate illness, and to provide a safe work environment in their construction sites. This paper describes an exploratory study of site safety management in construction sites’ environments. It explains a successful, modern safety, health and environmental management system for a leading construction company based in Hong Kong. A typical site-specific safety plan was utilized to provide safety guidance throughout the construction project. A safety management survey was conducted to determine the status of safety in the construction sites. All employees of the company and its subcontractors participated in the survey from 20 construction projects. In total, 1,022 valid records were obtained from the construction sites. The analysis provided useful information on eight aspects of construction s...

The concept of safety culture is relatively new in the construction industry; however, it is gaining popularity due to its ability to embrace all perceptional, psychological, behavioral, and managerial factors. To address the lack of a verifiable process to analyze construction safety culture, this technical note presents a robust conceptual model that has its roots firmly entrenched in pertinent academic and applied literature. It provides a critical review of the term “safety culture”; along with distinct yet related concepts (i.e., safety climate, behavior-based safety, and safety system). It also compares the proposed model with available safety culture models in order to demonstrate its applicability in construction site environments.

The prevalent disparity and divergence in the identification of safety-climate dimensions in the academia cause general confusion and inconvenience to both construction researchers and practitioners in terms of safety-climate measurement. Existing review studies identified several key dimensions or common features of safety climate, but only in a qualitative way. Whether these common features fit the reality and reflect the essence of construction safety climate is still to be verified by empirical studies. This research defined the core dimension and specific dimension of safety climate, identified the four most commonly used dimensions, and built a core dimension structure of safety climate accordingly. Empirical data collected from 21 Chinese construction enterprises were analyzed by means of structural equation modeling. The proposed core dimension structure and the corresponding measurement scale were validated rigorously by structural equation modeling approaches. Furthermore, two specific s...

Safety climate has long been considered a leading indicator for the management of construction safety. Although previous research has concluded that the safety climate of an organization is significantly affected by communication among its individuals, only a limited number of construction studies have explored this relationship as mediated by organizational fit. To redress this deficiency, this study investigated the association between communication and safety climate mediated by person-organization (P-O) fit. First, a baseline of communication responsibilities was established by analyzing project-related documentation from four subcontractors in China. Through a review of this documentation, 80 responses were collected, which were subjected to social network analysis (SNA) to develop metrics that gauge communication performance. By analyzing person-organization fit in terms of communication [as determined by degree centrality (POF-D) and betweenness centrality (POF-B)], the association between ...

With China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), the Chinese construction market will be increasingly open and finally become part of the international market. Because of different social and economic systems, as well as different historical and cultural backgrounds, contractors are likely to encounter different risks in different markets. Based on questionnaires and case studies, this paper adopts an importance evaluation index and makes an importance evaluation of various risks encountered by Chinese contractors when contracting for projects in Chinese markets. This paper also makes comparisons between and analyses of the research findings and related available investigation results. The Cox-Stuart trend increase test method is applied in the current research, the results indicating that the variance corresponding to the importance index value tends to increase as the risk event importance decreases. This tendency shows that those investigated tend towards unanimity in terms of higher importance risk events. This paper also examines the reliability of the questionnaires by means of Cronbach's Alpha Coefficient. The research shows that the main risk currently encountered by Chinese contractors in domestic markets includes owner's irregular behavior and government departments' interference in construction markets. China's accession to the WTO has provided greater opportunities for international contractors to enter the Chinese construction market. Therefore the research results described in this paper can provide valuable data enabling international contractors to gain a better understanding of the potential risks in the environment of the Chinese construction market.

This paper presents a risk assessment model for tendering of Chinese building projects on the basis of identification and evaluation of the major risk events in the Chinese construction market, investigations and interviews from which the factors inducing the risk events were determined, questionnaires on building projects within China's borders, and the logistic regression method. The findings show that, to a certain extent, the risk of tendering for projects and the risk of a contracted project can be assessed through analysis of factors such as owner type, source of project financing, existence or lack of past cooperation between contractors and owners, the intensity of competition for tendering, the reasonableness of the bid price, and the degree of support from the contracting company to its projects. The model can serve as a supplementary tool for Chinese contractors in making decisions for project tendering within Chinese borders. At the same time, it is of reference significance for international contractors, enabling them to further understand the risks in the contract market for Chinese building projects.

This paper presents information by which to measure safety management performance on construction sites. In China, the conventional construction safety benchmarking approach is to assess safety performance by evaluating the physical safety conditions on site as well as the accident records, while no attention has been paid to the management factors that influence site safety. This paper is to identify the key factors that influence safety management and to develop a method for measuring safety management performance on construction sites. Based on the survey and interview data collected on safety management factors in 82 construction projects in China, the safety management index as a means to evaluate real-time safety management performance by measuring key management factors was developed. The quantified factors were compared with the commonly accepted physical safety performance index, which was derived from inspection records of physical safety conditions, accident rates, and the satisfaction of the project management team. Multifactor linear regression was conducted and the result indicates that safety management performance on site is closely related to organizational factors, economic factors, and factors related to the relationship between management and labor on site. Based on this benchmarking study, a practical safety assessment method was developed and then implemented on six construction projects. The results show that this method can be an effective tool to evaluate safety management on construction projects.

The concept of safety culture is relatively new in the construction industry; however, it is gaining popularity due to its ability to embrace all perceptional, psychological, behavioral, and managerial factors. To address the lack of a verifiable process to analyze construction safety culture, this technical note presents a robust conceptual model that has its roots firmly entrenched in pertinent academic and applied literature. It provides a critical review of the term "safety culture"; along with distinct yet related concepts (i.e., safety climate, behavior-based safety, and safety system). It also compares the proposed model with available safety culture models in order to demonstrate its applicability in construction site environments.

We are very pleased to introduce this special issue of the Journal of Management in Engineering, titled “Engineering Management for Sustainable Development.” From an academic and research focus, sustainability within the built environment has traditionally been closely linked to habitat preservation and recycling of construction materials. For the past decade, we have witnessed a remarkable proliferation of environmental stewardship practices and policies involving energy efficiency, water conservation, climate change, renewable portfolio standards, and other issues. These advances expand the boundary of engineering management research and pose grand challenges for managing engineering projects in the context of nature, society, and future generations. Sustainable development aims to create the conditions in which humans and the environment exist in productive harmony. Sustainability research across the built environment has been continuously evolving because of its very nature and its relative youth as an academic focus. With this special issue, we aim to capitalize on the trend toward sustainable development by documenting this evolution, especially in light of the interface between sustainability and engineering management from a broader perspective. We believe that it is important for both researchers and practitioners to get a better understanding of where we stand and where we are headed. Our motivation seemed fully justified when our call for papers yielded nearly 30 submissions by the deadline. In total, 11 manuscripts were accepted for publication. We selected nine of them for inclusion in the special issue. Because of editorial issues and space limitations, the other two will be published later in regular issues. We are grateful to the authors of the papers for being responsive to the needs and deadlines of the special issue. We also thank the authors of all of the other papers that were submitted to the special issue. Without their participation, this endeavor would not have been a success. We would also like to thank all the reviewers and the journal publishing office for their continued support. Their tireless efforts and prompt responses helped us commit ourselves to this undertaking. This special issue features a paper by Chris Hendrickson regarding the engineering management challenges for sustainable infrastructure development. His paper lays out the main characteristics of sustainable energy infrastructure and outlines three engineering management priorities—energy efficiency, land use, and engineering education—during the switch to sustainable engineering. The remaining eight papers are categorized into three groups according to the subject of the papers. The first group of two papers deals with the ecological impact analysis of infrastructure project. The first paper, by Stephen Comello, Michael Lepech, and Benedict Schwegler, presents a general framework for ecosystem service valuation of infrastructure projects. In the second paper, Florian Gschosser, Holger Wallbaum, and Michael Boesch analyze the ecological potential of pavement construction. Three papers in the second group focus on carbon accounting methodologies for various facilities and construction operations, including water pipeline projects by Kalyan Piratla, Samuel Ariaratnam, and Aaron Cohen; construction equipment operation by Phil Lewis, Michael Leming, and William Rasdorf; and educational facilities by TaeHoon Hong, HyunJoong Kim, and TaeHyun Kwak. The last group of papers emphasizes the role of renewable energy for sustainable development. The first paper, written by Maria Balatbat, Emily Findlay, and David Carmichael evaluates the performance risk of 227 renewable energy projects under the clean development mechanism. The second paper, by Dezhi Li, Eddie Chi Man Hui, Xing Xu, and Qiming Li, focuses on the sustainability assessment on metro systems on the basis of an energy-based methodology. In the last paper, Rahul Hiremath and Bimlesh Kumar examine the economic feasibility of bioenergy through linear goal programming. The group of papers in this special issue represents a cross section of engineering management issues associated with sustainable development. Yet the interface and interaction between engineering management issues and sustainability are much broader and even more complex. We hope the special issue can spur thoughtful discussions on the role of engineering management for sustainable development and therefore promote further research and wide participation in this field from the engineering management community.

Being one of the greatest challenges of our time, climate change has become a top priority for governments, businesses, and the general public. In Copenhagen, both developed and developing countries made strong commitments on mitigating and adapting to climate change. And the United States officially pledged to cut its greenhouse gases emissions by 17% of the 2005 level by 2020. Many state and local governments have adopted even more aggressive reduction targets to tackle climate change. For example, Assembly Bill 32, passed in 2006, requires the state of California to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2020. Meeting emission reduction commitments poses significant challenges for federal and state governments and businesses across the economy. Although federal climate and energy policy is still in the early stage, it is becoming clear that both regulatory and market-based approaches at the federal and regional levels should be implemented to limit greenhouse gases emissions from stationary and mobile sources. In December 2009 the Environmental Protection Agency’s ruling that greenhouse gases—mainly carbon dioxide—endanger public health and welfare paved the way for new regulations on carbon dioxide emissions. In addition, more than 20 states have developed or are developing innovative market mechanisms to provide adequate incentives for regional emission reductions and renewable energy production, including the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative RGGI , Western Climate Initiative WCI , and Midwestern Greenhouse Gas Reduction Accord MGGRA , in addition to volunteer carbon markets, e.g., the Chicago Climate Exchange CCX . The impact of emerging climate regulations and markets on the engineering management community is significant. It goes beyond the life cycle of project execution and covers all aspects of engineering management practices. This special issue aims to advance the research and practice in this field. The goals of this special issue are threefold: 1 to report recent development in engineering management theory and practices to combat climate change; 2 to discover the latest research directions and thinking; and 3 to publish cutting-edge scholarship that contributes to the body of knowledge, promotes professional practices, and influences public policies.