BARRIERS TO INCIDENT REPORTING AND THEIR EFFECT ON ACCIDENT RATES IN PAKISTAN’S CONSTRUCTION SECTOR: DOES REPORTING BEHAVIOUR ACT AS THE MISSING LINK?

Abstract

Underreporting of workplace incidents is widely blamed for Pakistan’s poor construction safety record, yet little local evidence exists on which specific barriers actually drive it. This paper tests four commonly cited barriers — fear of blame/punishment, lack of reporting knowledge, time constraints, and lack of management support — against incident reporting behaviour and accident rates on construction sites in Pakistan, and asks whether reporting behaviour carries the effect of these barriers through to accidents. A structured questionnaire, built from established instruments (Probst & Brubaker, 2001; Mearns & Flin, 1999; Tucker et al., 2014; Zohar, 2000; Neal & Griffin, 2006), was circulated as a Google Form and returned 149 usable responses from safety managers, safety officers, and site supervisors/engineers. Every scale cleared the 0.70 reliability threshold (α = .74–.88). A multiple regression run on the four barriers explained 38.6% of the variance in reporting behaviour: lack of management support was easily the strongest predictor (β = –.53, p < .001), lack of reporting knowledge was also significant (β = –.22, p = .001), time constraints was not (p = .58), and fear of blame came out significant but in the direction opposite to what was hypothesized (β = .13, p = .027). Fear of blame was, however, a significant direct predictor of higher accident rates (β = .19, p = .002), as was time constraints in the full model (β = .44, p < .001). Bootstrapped mediation tests (5,000 resamples) found no indirect effect that reached significance at the .05 level, though the path running through lack of reporting knowledge came closest (p = .131). Overall, the results point to management support and reporting knowledge as the barriers most worth acting on, and raise a question the existing literature does not fully answer: whether fear of blame behaves differently among safety professionals than it does among the frontline labourers most of the barrier literature was written about