AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

Stakeholder risk attitudes in safety risk management : exploring the relationship between risk attitude and safety risk management performance

by Shichao Ma




Institution: University of Hong Kong
Department:
Degree: PhD
Year: 2015
Keywords: Construction projects - Management
Record ID: 1175291
Full text PDF: http://hdl.handle.net/10722/210183


Abstract

A construction project requires a multitude of people with different skills and interests and the coordination of a wide range of disparate, yet interrelated, activities. Such complexity is further compounded by the unique characteristics of a project and many other external uncertainties. As a result, construction is subject to more risk than other business activities. In a risky situation, individuals or organizations perceive the situation in their own ways and behave differently to meet their own interests. Many researchers have asserted that divergent risk attitudes are sources of mismatched risk perceptions and inconsistent behaviors among project participants in different organizations, which can disturb proactive and consistent organizational activities. The research on risk attitude has, therefore, been advocated to exploring ways to consistently arouse people‘s cognition, affection, and behavior among stakeholders. However, previous research has been a widely misunderstood concept and remains a fragmented focus in the construction field. Evidence on the construction of risk attitude and how it manifests itself is unavailable. To date, prior researchers have suffered from an issue-oriented focus that has resulted in simplified models by studying single level of antecedents of risk attitude and consequences of management performance, rather than multi-level. Moreover, previous studies only focused on the direct relationship between risk attitude and management performance instead of providing a profound conceptualization of the indirect relationship between risk attitude and management performance or empirically exploring risk attitude‘s antecedents and consequences. The current study seeks to bridge this research gap. Triangulation research is employed as an appropriate research methodology in which both qualitative and quantitative data collection are used to test the research propositions. The research plan draws upon ontology and methodological pluralism. By adopting the Critical Incident Technique (CIT), coupled with an intensive literature review, one can explore the manifestation of risk attitude and its antecedents by analyzing critical incidents derived from preliminary interviews. Cognitive Motivation Theory (CMT) and Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) provide rationales to combine a processed view of risk attitude and the antecedents and management performance of individuals and organizations into a multi-level model of risk attitude. Responses to a questionnaire survey of 239 individuals nested in 61organizations were analyzed with a blend of Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) to establish and examine the hypothesized relationships in the theoretical model. To capture the practical manifestation of risk attitude and its influence on management performance, case studies of two ongoing construction projects were performed. The findings summarized from both qualitative and quantitative studies indicated that risk attitude diverged due to the multi-level…