Critical Human and Organizational Factors for Structural Safety in the Dutch Construction Industry

Human errors are widely acknowledged as the primary cause of structural failures in the construction industry. Research has found that such errors arise from the situation created by human factors and organizational factors embedded in the task context. However, these contextual factors have not been adequately addressed in the construction industry. Therefore, this study aims to identify the critical Human and Organizational Factors (HOFs) that influence structural safety in frequently performed tasks in structural design and construction.

Through a comprehensive literature review, a framework consisting of potential critical factors called the HOPE framework, is presented. To identify the most critical HOFs that contribute to human error occurrences, a questionnaire survey to experts in the Dutch construction industry was conducted. Finally, the resulting framework was compared with three actual structural failures for validation.

This study shows that the HOFs should be extended with project-related factors (P) and working environment-related factors (E) due to the fact that these task contextual conditions play a significant role in shaping professionals' on-the-job performance. Furthermore, a survey identified 14 HOFs as critical in contributing to an error-prone situation in the structural design and construction tasks.

The presented HOPE framework and the identified critical HOFs for structural safety can assist engineers with better hazard identification and quality assurance in practice.