Journal of Emerging Trends in Economics and Management Sciences: Home

Article Title:
Safety Culture as an Idiosyncratic Resource for a Construction Firm's Sustainable Competitive Advantage
by Dr Okanga Boniface

Abstract:
A mature and resilient safety culture often turns into a strategic idiosyncratic value creating resource that edifies a construction firm?s sustainable competitive advantage. Amature and resilient safety culture enhances the minimisation of costs, and the improvement of productivity, quality, and public trust and confidence. All these translate into cost advantages, differentiation of a firm from rivals and improved customer focus. Unfortunately, the research on how an entrenched safety culture turns into an idiosyncratic resource to edify a construction firm?s sustainable competitive advantage seems to have not yet been widely explored by most studies. This research investigated the sustainable competitive advantage effects of safety culture, its major inhibitors as an idiosyncratic resource and the model that can be suggested. Using a qualitative exploratory study, in-depth interviews were conducted with twenty participants comprising of the managers, site supervisors and the ordinary employees from ten judgmentally sampled construction firms. Although findings revealed a resilient safety culture to translate into an idiosyncratic resource that edifies competitiveness, most of the construction firms were found to face constraints linked to their largely reactive and compliant safety management systems. The study adds a new theory onto the existing wealth of knowledge on safety culture by suggesting a hybrid model that the construction firms can adopt in the process of nurturing safety culture as a strategic idiosyncratic value creating resource. The study will impact on the improvement of the construction firm?s better safety practices and behaviours that can subsequently turn into inimitable sources of sustainable competitive advantage.

Keywords: construction firm; idiosyncratic resource; safety culture; sustainable competitive advantage

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