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 limited local evidence exists regarding the specific barriers that contribute to this problem. This study examines four commonly cited barriers—fear of blame or punishment, lack of reporting knowledge, time constraints, and lack of management support—and their relationships with incident reporting behaviour and accident rates on construction sites in Pakistan. It also investigates whether reporting behaviour mediates the relationship between these barriers and accidents. A structured questionnaire developed from established instruments (Probst & Brubaker, 2001; Mearns & Flin, 1999; Tucker et al., 2014; Zohar, 2000; Neal & Griffin, 2006) was distributed through Google Forms, yielding 149 usable responses from safety managers, safety officers, and site supervisors/engineers. All scales demonstrated acceptable reliability, with Cronbach’s alpha values ranging from .74 to .88. Multiple regression analysis showed that the four barriers explained 38.6% of the variance in reporting behaviour. Lack of management support was the strongest predictor (β = –.53, p < .001), followed by lack of reporting knowledge (β = –.22, p = .001), while time constraints were not significant (p = .58). Fear of blame was significant but showed a positive relationship with reporting behaviour, contrary to the hypothesized direction (β = .13, p = .027). Furthermore, fear of blame significantly predicted higher accident rates (β = .19, p = .002), while time constraints were also a significant predictor in the full model (β = .44, p < .001). Bootstrapped mediation analysis using 5,000 resamples found no significant indirect effects at the .05 level, although the pathway through lack of reporting knowledge approached significance (p = .131). Overall, the findings highlight management support and reporting knowledge as the most important areas for intervention and raise an important question regarding whether fear of blame operates differently among safety professionals than among frontline construction workers, who have been the primary focus of much of the existing literature.