In: The International journal of construction education and research: a tri-annual publication of the Associated Schools of Construction, Band 12, Heft 4, S. 243-254
In: The International journal of construction education and research: a tri-annual publication of the Associated Schools of Construction, Band 16, Heft 3, S. 151-166
Past research on construction project safety has mainly been focused on safety risks, safety culture, and safety system development. This research aims to reveal project manager skills that could influence project safety performance. It is proposed that project managers need to have four essential skills, namely conceptual, human, political, and technical skill. Through a comprehensive review of relevant literatures, this research argues that project manager skills influence project manager's safety leadership, which ultimately influence project safety performance. A theoretical framework has been developed and future research will focus on collecting empirical data to test these relationships.
Many previous studies have reported that the occupational health and safety (OHS) enforcement is poor in developing countries, however these studies have mainly focused on the broader enforcement problems and not fully considered the challenges confronting the institutions responsible for enforcing OHS standards at workplaces. In this study, twelve potential challenges were identified from an extensive literature review, then an empirical investigation was carried out via a questionnaire survey from OHS inspectors and professionals in the Ghanaian construction industry. The twelve challenges were confirmed and ranked. Also, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and correlation were used to determine the statistical significance of the responses and the relationships between the challenges. Based on these findings, this study provides practical strategies for government, OHS inspectors and other professionals within the construction industry to improve the OHS enforcement. The research findings can also be adopted as a basis to assess challenges confronting OHS institutions in other developing countries.
There is still limited research that investigates emotional intelligence in the context of the real estate sector in China, despite the rapid growth of the industry. Furthermore, there has been an exponential increase in the number of Chinese students studying overseas. Underpinned by these tendencies, this research investigates the levels of emotional intelligence of overseas and local graduates in the real estate sector in China. Data were collected using a survey of 140 employees and semi-structured interviews of four human resource managers in six Grade One state-owned real estate companies in China. The findings suggest that emotional intelligence influences the levels of interpersonal skills, represented by communication skills and teamwork behaviour. However, there is no difference in the levels of emotional intelligence between overseas and local graduates, suggesting that there are other factors that influence emotional intelligence development. Overseas graduates also seem to have greater difficulties than local graduates from elite universities to find jobs in the real estate sector. This suggests that international study experience is no longer adequate; instead, various contextualised interpersonal skills are needed to meet work demands in China. Developing emotional intelligence has been found to promote success across cultures and is a way to meet the demands of today's work environments in the real estate industry in China.