Construction Workers' Absence Behavior Under Social Influence.

Abstract

Due to the labor intensive nature of construction, workers’ timely attendance and operation at the site is crucial to the success of a construction project. Recently, researchers have found that worker absenteeism is subject to social influences. However, it is not clear how strongly the social control in workgroups affects worker absence behavior in construction, and nor is it known how social controls regarding absence are exerted over workers. With this background in mind, the overarching goal of this research is threefold: (1) to enhance our understanding of the dynamic processes of the emergence and exertion of social controls for worker absence behavior in construction, (2) to extend our understanding of the group-level absence phenomenon in construction, and (3) to identify effective policies and interventions to reduce absenteeism by creating favorable social norms in construction projects. To achieve these goals, five interrelated, interdisciplinary studies using survey analysis, the agent-based modeling and simulation of human behavior, and a behavioral economic experiment were conducted. These studies revealed that (1) team cohesion affects workers’ behavior in construction; (2) construction workers who perceive salient social norms in their team are less likely to be absent from a job site; (3) workers are under the influence of social norms more likely by self-categorization than by interpersonal exertion of social controls; (4) attachment and commitment to the current project are important variables for workers’ self-regulation, and therefore play a significant role in creating favorable social norms over time in workgroups; (5) workgroup’s mean level of social adaptation and mean level of formal rule adaptation can explain variance in the group-level absence rate; (6) there is a general pattern of alignment, but also a measurable difference between workers’ social norms and managers’ desired norms; and (7) workers who have emotional and/or evaluative identification with their project tend to have personal standards regarding absence that are similar to what their managers desire. These findings enhance our knowledge about the social mechanism for worker absence behavior in construction, and provide insights into how to prevent/reduce excessive absenteeism in construction projects by creating desirable social norms regarding absence.