Safety Culture Affect the Project In KSA Construction Industry - Essay Example

This spell out the need for there to be as many policies on health and safety as possible. However, it is important to know that solution to this existing problem does not end with just having policies on health and safety in place. This is because Stank, Daugherty and Gustin (2004) made mention of several safety policies that unisexist construction industry, which have not been adhered to adequately by field supervisors and site managers.

Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and The Health Standards 1926 and 1910 are mentioned as examples of existing health and safety policies that have easily been overlooked by the construction industry. In an independent study, Symons (2005) noted that there are several site managers and supervisors who refuse to adhere to health and safety policies because they hold the opinion that the solution to increasing cases of accidents and injuries at the sites is not in documented policies. To most of these supervisors and managers, the need for field based practical interventions that address specific problems at the site should be the way forward. But as rates of injuries and accidents have been said to go up by up to 23% in the last decay, there is evidence that the field-based interventions are not working well (Stank, Daugherty and Gustin, 2004). This calls for the need to revisit the use of documented policies that can be factored into the overall safety cultures of the companies.

According to Williamsen (2013), a safety culture provides the project leader with the courage to follow through with all the decisions that he has made because, without it, his decisions will most likely not be taken seriously by his subordinates and will become meaningless. This means that the call to have documented safety policies will be a way to establish tinge safety culture because it will ensure that safety practices are followed in more specific means than in arbitrary ways. This means that in the Saudi construction industry, there is the need for developing the integration of conservative Saudi safety culture into the design of the building sectors (Zou, Redman & Windon, 2008). It is a fact that many project leaders in Saudi Arabia in the past have been unsuccessful because they have failed to consider the importance of making safety part of the organizational culture in a manner that forms a safety culture for the construction companies.

The rationale for this assertion is that Symons (2005) noted that when a safety culture is instituted, it overlaps between both safety an organizational culture, ensuring that none of this takes premium over the other. Once this happens, project leaders are guided to be systematic when making decisions concerning safety and project performance, especially when these decisions are needed the most (DeJoy, Gershon & Schaffer, 2004). In this industry, every project leader should be conscious of the situations involve of their workers and this enables them to ensure that the safety of those who work in the construction site is ensured; they have to consider the best safety solutions that are culturally acceptable (Nelson, 1996; Simon & Frazee, 2005). With a safety culture, leaders will study the safety organizationalonal cultural needs exceptionally well and understand them so that their decisions concerning the project can be correct and well informed and this is likely to ensure that safety standards and the project performance are of the high.