Abstract
The Norwegian construction industry is a hazardous industry, with persistently higher rates of workplace accidents and fatalities compared to other industries. Safety challenges primarily arise from misunderstandings between actors with different safety perspectives, a lack of coordination among structures and systems across operations, and difficulties in establishing shared routines and learning in projects that constantly change staffing, organization, and work tasks. Despite increased attention and efforts over the years, accident rates have remained largely unchanged and statistically stable. Traditional approaches to evaluating safety performance tend to focus on what went wrong (number of accidents) but often fail to explain why incidents occur or what actually contributes to safe outcomes. This limits our ability to understand and improve safety performance, highlighting the need for a new way of thinking about how safety performance is understood, measured, and managed.
The main objective of this PhD dissertation is to identify and classify different understandings of safety performance, and to explore the implications of these differences for both research and practice.
The research contributes by clarifying the conceptual foundations of safety performance, mapping current measurement practices, and identifying critical success factors in early project phases. Findings reveal three main dimensions of safety performance in construction safety research: loss-based, management-based, and behavior- and culture-based. The findings also highlight the limitations of relying solely on quantitative indicators and emphasize the need to integrate qualitative, contextual, and relational aspects into safety management. This challenges the assumption that everything that is important to safety can be measured, and instead argues for a balanced approach that values both measurable outcomes and non-quantifiable practices. It emphasizes the importance of making safety a key part of organizational performance, projects, and safety management, integrated into the organization’s strategic decision-making processes. Pre-construction critical success factors, such as leadership engagement, contractor involvement, and role clarity, are highlighted as particularly influential and important for future safety performances. However, these factors are often qualitative, context-dependent, and difficult to quantify, which makes them underrepresented in traditional performance management and measurement systems. The findings emphasize the need for a more holistic and strategic value-driven approach to safety performance—one that accounts for stakeholder diversity, project context, and the integration of safety into broader organizational and project performance goals.