Discretionary Control over Safety Resources: Examining Workers’ Safety Territorial Behaviors in Construction Projects

Accident response and prevention in construction require workers to possess essential safety resources such as knowledge, skills, mindset, and hazard alerts. By adopting safety territorial behavior (STB), workers can discretionarily expand their territory by interacting with others to gain resources or defend it by avoiding interaction to protect existing ones, which is more effective than traditional top-down approaches such as mandatory training. Despite its importance, research on STB’s antecedents and outcomes is limited. Drawing on event system theory and conservation of resources theory, we propose a dual-path model explaining STB formation and its impact on safety performance. An experience sampling study of 142 construction workers over 10 days shows that strong positive events promote territorial expanding, improving safety performance, while strong negative events trigger territorial defending, reducing safety performance. Promotion focus intensifies the effect of positive events, but prevention focus does not moderate the impact of negative events. This study shifts the emphasis from top-down resource allocation to workers’ proactive resource acquisition, advocating for strategies that promote territorial expanding, such as worker-led safety discussions and minimizing negative events.