INFLUENCE OF CULTURE ON MIGRANT WORKERS' SAFETY PERFORMANCE IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Construction sites have been recognized to be the most hazardous workplaces in Singapore. While Singapore has improved on workplace safety and health, fatality rate still exceeds that of some developed countries. The persistently poor safety and health performance of the construction industry calls for stakeholders’ interventions to improve the situation. In addition, while statistics for workplace injuries can be publicly found, migrant workers’ disproportionately high injury rates are rarely emphasized.

According to Hofstede, people from different nationalities think differently as a result of a national culture developed through one’s experience. National culture is thus explored with a desire to effectively tackle and rectify behavioral problems causing the unacceptably high injury rate recorded. As a matter of fact, multiculturalism is a distinctive feature of the Singapore construction industry with the workforce comprising workers from different trades and countries of origin.

This study explored the influence of culture of migrant workers on construction safety performance in Singapore and developed strategies to effectively manage the workforce to improve their construction safety performance, with a targeted focus on Indian and Bangladeshi workers.

The research method is based on literature review, exploratory interviews, pre-tested questionnaire surveys, and subsequent interviews with questionnaire survey respondents to obtain qualitative inputs. Fieldworks were conducted and data were collected from Indian and Bangladeshi migrant workers working in Singapore’s construction industry.

Findings draw attention to the role national culture plays in workers’ safety performance. This study reveals that the majority of Indian and Bangladeshi construction workers have a good degree of safety awareness, but they believe in high power distance, opt for lower uncertainty avoidance in their attitude and exhibit collective behaviours. Low uncertainty avoidance and high collectivism are banes in the context of safety performance as people might collectively engage in unsafe acts under social circumstances. This highlights the importance of managements' safety responsibilities and the implementation of precautionary measures in the pursuit to enhance these workers’ safety performance, and the need to strengthen our existing safety statutory and implementations.

Strategies were then recommended to effectively manage the workforce to improve their construction safety performance.

Although the study presented may not be exhaustive, it is a step taken to better understand the influence of national culture on the safety performance of Indian and Bangladeshi workers in Singapore construction industry. While national culture is not the only and most important factor that explains migrant workers’ disproportionately high safety injury rate, it deserves more research attention in the context of Singapore construction industry.