Participative safety: a case study in Construction

The text discusses how workers participation in the prevention management process of a large construction project can function as a key success factor to an effective improvement of working conditions and to reduce accidents probability. Will be analyzed the contribution of the participative safety in the work organization management and in the workers safety performance. Also will be presented different participation forms that can be adopted by one organization in order to achieve a participative safety management, signaling the operationalization possibilities in real organizational context and the implementation specificities of those different mechanisms. Finally, it will be demonstrated how these precepts were adopted in the Corgo Viaduct construction project (county of Vila Real, Portugal), a work of high technical complexity, which was considered a high-risk safety project. The experiment carried out enabled the traditional fragmentation and work division gave way to a discourse of integration, where safety issues and activities began to be discussed and considered across all organizational process. It was a context that favored the creation of levels of commitment and motivation in the workers, contributing to achieving the main safety objective defined at the beginning of the construction project - "zero deaths, zero serious accidents."