Job Burnout and Safety Performance in the Hong Kong Construction Industry
The Hong Kong construction industry has been characterized by a stressful work environment together with a poor safety record. The construction professionals always have to face the immense pressure from the tight schedule. Job burnout is thus experienced
- PDF / 120,222 Bytes
- 3 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 78 Downloads / 146 Views
Job Burnout and Safety Performance in the Hong Kong Construction Industry
12.1 Burnout and Safety Many researchers have investigated the effect of burnout. It has been suggested as a major reaction produced by job stress (Lee and Ashford 1993; Cordes and Dougherty 1993) and the result when an individual is exposed to constant and routine stress over a prolonged period of time (Westman and Eden 1997). Maslach et al. (1996) defined burnout phenomenon as a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, cynicism and reduced personal accomplishment. Emotional exhaustion refers to feelings of depleted emotional resources and a lack of energy. Cynicism incorporates a cynical attitude involving an exaggerated distancing from work. Diminished personal accomplishment means a situation in which employees tend to evaluate themselves negatively and become dissatisfied with their accomplishments at work (Yip 2007). Yip (2007) investigated the phenomenon of job burnout in the Hong Kong construction industry. 33 and 17 % of participants experienced severe burnout in emotional exhaustion and cynicism respectively. Burnout is often associated with mental and physical disorders such as distress, anxiety, headaches and sleep disturbances (Maslach et al. 2001; Tang 2001; Gunn 2004). Individuals suffering from burnout would produce work of lower quality and are often involved with making mistakes at work (Smith 1999). Thus, occupational stress may lead to workplace accidents. For decades site safety has received a lot of attention and effort, yet not entirely satisfactory in the Hong Kong construction industry. Significant progress has been made but improvement rate has reached another plateau in recent years. A study funded by the Construction Industry Institute has confirmed that most safety measures are effective and mature organizations have better performance (Rowlinson et al. 2009). Prescription by the Government and the Authority, and self-regulation by the organizations were effective to improve safety but it appears that the existing plateau one can only break through by a change in culture. Indeed safety has now become one of the most important priorities of the stakeholders in the local industry.
R. Y. M. Li and S. W. Poon, Construction Safety, Risk Engineering, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-35046-7_12, Ó Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013
153
154
12 Job Burnout and Safety Performance in the Hong Kong
The presence of job burnout phenomenon could be accountable for the high accident rate in the Hong Kong construction industry. Lagarade et al. (2004) has discovered the positive correlation between high level of emotional exhaustion and accident causation. Research has found that the coping strategy, adopted by individuals, is likely to have a moderating effect on the relationship between job burnout and safety performance. A study was undertaken at The University of Hong Kong (Poon et al. 2012) to explore whether or not there is an interaction between job burnout and safety performance, including the identification of possible coping st
Data Loading...
