Improving the Safety Management System for Ensuring the Psychological Safety of Construction Workers : Policy Recommendations on the Broken Transmission of Serious-Accident Regulation and Institutional Hollowing-out
Abstract
[Purpose] Despite successive regulatory and punitive reinforcements, serious accidents in Korean construction have not fallen to policy targets. In 2025 injuries declined 14.4% while fatalities rose 10.1%, and the fatal accident rate eased only from 1.57 to 1.54 per 10,000 workers, driven by a 12.6% larger insured workforce. Reframing this as stalled improvement with unmet reduction targets, this study proposes a psychological-safety-centered reform of the safety management system. [Method] An integrative review of 65 items was conducted from 15 April to 26 July 2026 across Korean and international databases, including a third round targeting construction samples that measured safety voice. Selection and coding rules and a three-tier citation hierarchy favouring construction evidence were fixed before screening; re-coding after two weeks yielded 97.4% agreement across 195 judgments, and the corpus is disclosed in full. [Results] Regulatory reinforcement reaches documentation but not the frontline behaviors of workers who first perceive hazards. In a construction sample, no condition—including psychological safety(0.769)—met the necessity threshold of 0.90, yet high safety voice emerged under job insecurity and voice cost when psychological safety and job control were present. Economic conditions are distal determinants of the expected cost of voice, with psychological safety as the proximal gateway. Evidence-density mapping found zero studies on the segment from rights exercise to safety participation. [Conclusion] Five policies are specified with agencies, legal bases, and phases. Three principles keep the remedy from reproducing hollowing-out: obligating responses rather than documents, holding regulatory burden constant, and judging performance by exercise and response records. Instruments are ranked structural-incentive, behavioral, then documentary, and hollowing-out is operationalized into four indicators.