Collective Mindfulness: A Dimension of Construction Safety Climate

Abstract

The construction industry is a high-risk industry known for high fatality rates all over the world. It is quite different from other industries due to its complicated processes, changing work locations, and complex work environments. A wide range of safety management approaches have been introduced and used to manage construction risks, thus advanced methods and approaches are required to further reduce accidents and incidents. High-reliability organising has emerged from research into high hazard industries where collective mindfulness is recognised as a thriving concept that leads these organisations to maintain error free operations. In this study, the Mindfulness Organising Scale is introduced as a safety climate dimension. The five principles of collective mindfulness: preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and deference to expertise can measure the degree of anticipating safety problems and containing them after accidents and incidents occur in a construction organisation. Safety climate is often considered a predictor of safety behaviour. It checks whether the behaviour of people in the organisation matches the rhetoric. The commonly used indicators to measure safety climate in construction are management commitment to safety; safety policies, resources, and training; supervisor commitment to safety; organizational commitment to safety; co-workers' commitment to safety; safety communication; worker involvement in safety; risk appraisal and risk-taking. Along with them, a mindfulness organising scale is recommended to measure the safety climate to identify the pitfalls of current safety management practices in a construction organisation.