Antecedents of Workplace Safety Behavior: Meta-Analysis in the Construction Industry

Despite a recent surge in publications on construction safety, the findings on the effect sizes of antecedents of safety behavior are still dispersed and equivocal. This research aimed to analyze the influences of diverse antecedents on safety behavior by accumulating the effect sizes through a meta-analysis of existing studies on the high-risk construction industry. Data were gleaned from 58 primary articles to calculate effect sizes for 21 antecedents. The results quantified effects among three categories of safety behavior antecedents: proximal personal factors (i.e., safety knowledge, motivation, and strain), distal situational factors (i.e., job demands and job resources), and distal personal factors (i.e., key resources and job attitudes). We also exploratively showed that safety behavior antecedent effect sizes were stronger in cultures with high uncertainty avoidance and varied inconsistently when safety behavior was measured with an industry-specific scale compared with a universal one. An exemplar path model verified that the three factors, namely safety knowledge, motivation, and strain, partially mediated the effects of situational antecedents (job demands and job resources) on safety behavior. Through a cumulative assessment, this research contributes to the construction safety literature by quantifying the relationship between safety behavior and its antecedents, emphasizing the fundamental significance of contingent factors and confirming a synthesized conceptual model that informs the mechanisms liking safety behavior and its antecedents.