Impact of owners’ safety management behavior on construction workers’ unsafe behavior

• An owners’ impact mechanism on construction workers’ safety behavior is presented. • Enterprise-level managers directly or indirectly affect workers’ safety behavior. • Hazard and emergency management has the most positive impact on workers’ safety behavior. • Workers’ safety behavior influences managers’ behavior in turn. • Objectives and assessment have two distal mediation effect paths on workers’ safety behavior. Construction safety is a serious issue in the construction industry, while workers’ unsafe behavior is one of the major factors leading to construction accidents. It is believed that owners’ safety management behavior has an important impact on workers’ unsafe behavior. However, the specific impact mechanism is not yet clear from the perspective of owners, resulting in that the role of owners’ safety management in safety performance is relatively low. This research aims to reveal the impact path and ability of owners’ diverse management behavior on workers’ safety behavior by establishing a structural model, which contains the dimensions under the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and Behavior-Based Safety (BBS). Firstly, based on the theories, the key safety management dimensions in developers or owners were determined and the hypothetical model of the safety impact mechanism is presented. Then, a questionnaire survey was conducted in a large real estate developer in China, 2,991 valid questionnaires were collected. Empirical analysis was further conducted by using Confirmatory Factory Analysis (CFA) and Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The results show that objectives and assessments (OA) and safety organization (SO) have an indirect effect on workers’ safety behavior (WSB) through management practices (i.e., hazard and emergency management (HEM), and subcontractor management (SM)), while WSB also influences accident management (AM). Particularly, the path with the most impact power is OA-SO-HEM-WSB. These research findings can guide developers or owners to participate in the performance improvement of construction safety management.