Being stigmatised as a dirty, dangerous and difficult (3D) industry, the Malaysian construction industry is critically plagued with incessantly growing occupational accidents and fatalities (CIDB, 2018). Current statistics indicate that the construction industry is considerably lagged behind other major industries in technology adoption and implementation (Bosch-sijtsema, et al., 2021). Previous studies suggested that incorporating advanced technology into safety management practices could offer valuable opportunities for enhancing construction safety (Liu, et al., 2020; Nnaji, Jafarnejad and Gambatese, 2020;
Martinez, Gheisari and Alarcón, 2020; Asadzadeh, et al., 2020).
Unfortunately, in spite of a plethora of safety technology related studies, implementation of safety technologies are not much prevailing in actual construction projects (Nnaji, et al., 2019). Besides, little is known about the dimensions influencing safety technology adoption in developing countries like Malaysia. In addition, prior studies have allocated a great amount of attention on examining the factors affecting the diffusion of innovations particularly aimed to improve construction productivity, quality and project management.
Nonetheless, there has been a paucity of attention paid to the factors influencing the construction practitioners’ decisions to adopt safety technologies to improve construction safety. In response to this, this study addresses the knowledge gap and rectifies the exacerbating safety situation by examining the potentials of
safety technologies, influential factors of technologies adoption and potential strategies to raise the adoption level.
A comprehensive literature review as conducted has successfully identified 10 potentials of safety technologies, 20 influential factors and 10 potential strategies. Following the detailed literature review, a questionnaire was formulated as a tool for data collection in the field survey targeted at the Malaysian construction practitioners from different discipline groups comprising developers, consultants and contractors based in the Klang Valley region in Malaysia. A total of 133 sets of responses were obtained and analysed using the appropriate statistical techniques. All the variables were ranked and prioritised in accordance with their mean scores. The research objectives were achieved by the end of the study and summarised as follows:
Objective 1:
The first objective and research question were to appraise the potentials of safety technologies in construction safety management. All the 10 potentials are found to be significant and the three potentials with the highest means are:
improve hazard identification, reinforce safety planning and enhance safety inspection. Apart from that, there is a strong agreement between the three respondent groups in ranking these potentials, except for “design for safety”
which was ranked relatively higher by the developers, as they are proactive towards safety designs and have been the most active group in safety design reviews. To further measure how the practitioners feel about using IR 4.0 technologies particularly on safety management in the future, the respondents were asked the evaluate the effectiveness of several types of safety technologies based on their expectations. It is found that the practitioners in Malaysia have high expectations on the feasibilities of BIM, wearable safety technologies, and automation and robotics in improving safety performance on site.
Objective 2:
Further, the second objective was aimed to uncover the factors affecting safety technologies adoption in construction projects. Through the empirical survey, all 20 factors are found to be relevant and significant. It is revealed that
the expertise and skill of project team are the most influential factor, while the other leading factors include proven technology effectiveness, top management support, government promotion and initiative, and technology reliability. By adopting the factor analysis technique, the underlying factors impacting safety technology diffusion were identified. The four principal factors comprised organisation’s commitment and technology orientation, supporting technological attributes, personal perception and performance expectancy, and government supports. Intrinsically, these underlying dimensions highlight the significance of considerable outputs from the top managements, individuals, technology developers and policymakers to drive changes. The results also provide the global construction community with deeper insights into devising effective strategies in facilitating the adoption process, which will ultimately lead to improved safety performance in construction. It is worth noting that the respondents had heterogeneous views on several influential factors, namely technology compatibility, personal privacy and personal motivation. It is found that the developers ranked these three factors relatively lower than the consultants and contractors.
Objective 3:
The present study also identified ten potential strategies to raise safety technology adoption, thereby achieving and answering the third research objective and question of this study. All the potential strategies are found to be significant. In the overall context, the three most effective strategies are reinforcement of training and education, provision of government incentives and establishment of government mandates, indicating the vital roles played by the management and government. Nonetheless, the analysis revealed that there were significant differences in the perceptions of the respondent groups on
“collaboration between industry, universities and research institutes”. Such differences were due to distinct roles played by different disciplines in the industry. Based on the correlation test between the influential factors of technology adoption and strategies to raise the adoption level, it is revealed that
“provide government incentives” and “reinforce training and education” have significant correlations with the factors. Meanwhile, “proven technology
effectiveness” and “provide government incentives” have the most significant relationship.
Overall, the current study represents the first empirical effort focused on augmenting the understandings of the influential factors impacting the adoption of safety technologies in the Malaysian construction industry. By conducting a research on safety technology adoption, the implementation of emerging technologies at different phases in the construction life cycle is expected to escalate. Accordingly, the construction safety performance can be enhanced, thereby bridging the lacuna between the construction sector and other industries in terms of safety.