CHAPTER ONE
Introduction
An overview of construction quality and safety reveals many striking similarities for these two management concept. In some cases safety is considered a part of total quality management (TQM). In the international construction scene, the inclusion of both the traditional qualities and safety efforts within a TQM system is advocated by Dias and Curado (1996). They suggest that the TQM emphasis on the customer will lead to protection of the employee who is a vital customer. They write that safety record keeping would be improved and a needed safety culture comparable to the existing quality culture would result.
Quality management has increasingly been adopted by construction companies as an initiative to solve quality problems and to meet the need of final costumer ( kanji and wong, 1998). As suggested by (Oakland and Aldridge, 1995) if ever an industry needed to take up the concept of total quality management (TQM),it is the construction industry. Alfred (1988) advances the view that construction very probably promises a greater pay back for performance improvement than any other service industry because of its magnitude.
Over the years, a lot of attention has focused on the causes of occupational incident (Haslam 2005). When accident occur in the work place, it is important to understand what human factors may have contributed to the out come in order to avoid similar incidents in the future. Through developing and understanding of why and how incident occur, appropriate method for incident prevention can be developed (Williamson and Feyer 2002). In the past, any attempt to improve work safety or to control work place risk has focused on technical aspects and on the direct influence of human behaviour (Gadd and Collins 2002). Several papers have sought to identify specific safety management practice that acts as a predictor of safety performance (Mearns 2003). Through examining organization with good safety performance, it was intended to identify common features that are associated with good safety performance.
This Research work will present a review of the literature on quality management and then on safety culture in construction industry. It will also use data from the studies on quality and safety in construction industry to further illustrate the problem of defining quality.
1.1 STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
It is commonly known that accident have serious implication to the construction industry both in financial and humanitarian terms. Construction accidents may cause many problems such as:
1 Demotivation of workers
2 Disruption of site activities
3 Delay of project progress and adversely affecting the overall cost, productivity and reputation of the construction industry (Mohammed, 1999).