The role of leadership in the transformation of health and safety culture in the South African construction industry

D.Phil. (Engineering Management)Abstract: The question of whether a role improvement of top leadership will benefit H&S culture transformation to achieve improved H&S outcomes in the South African construction industry is weighed up against a plethora of literature available on H&S leadership. The interest from many scholars has unequivocally been focused on exploring leadership practices affecting H&S in the middle and lower management, while minimal attention was directed to top leadership, specifically. This is particularly amplified in the South African construction industry, leading to a gap in the body of knowledge for a study that is distinctly directed leadership, explicitly. The primary objective of this study was to investigate the role of organisational leadership by exploring top leadership interventions which will promote an expedient H&S culture transformation in the South African infrastructure construction projects. The study highlighted the criticality aspects of top leadership practices and attitudes, in particular how they link to the H&S outcomes, by relating them to their accident causation potential, based on core decision-making at the strategic levels. A comprehensive literature review was conducted, and the principal output was the hypothesis that the national and industry context has a direct influence on top leadership H&S commitment, while at the same time, this top leadership H&S commitment has a direct positive influence on H&S culture outcomes. Based on these assumptions, a theoretical model directed at strengthening the training and auditing functionality, to enable the contextual competence of the top leaders, was developed. A pragmatic/contextual paradigm was defined, where a mixed, exploratory sequential method was applied to collect and analyse data (i.e., semi-structured interviews & survey questionnaires). Nonprobability, purposive sampling was applied to top managers in construction contractors on all 9 CIDB levels, then a non-probability convenient followed by probability, random sampling on N=182. The findings on the impact of top leadership commitment demonstrate that top leadership H&S commitment is the driving force behind the success or failure of the organizational H&S effort; therefore, H&S should be given the same level of attention and class as other TMT functions. Also, it is shown that there is very high H&S awareness amongst the top leadership; despite this, H&S commitment from the top leadership still lacks. This lack of H&S commitment from the top leadership is linked to the shortage of knowledge in this area of expertise. From these findings, recommendations which are anchored on the implementation by top leaders, cognizance of culture implications by top leaders, consideration by policy-makers and legislation, theoretical consideration by the body of knowledge and experimental application for researchers were made in detail