Relationship between Stress Level and Reworks for Construction Professionals

This paper presents a study investigating the relationship between stress level and reworks for construction professionals. As employees' work-life balance (WLB) becomes more important nowadays, controlling the level of stress in the workplace becomes more important as occupational stress has negative impacts on WLB. Reworks can be one severe occupational stressor as people suffer from stress when they need to redo their works. This study hypothesizes that there is a positive correlation between reworks and level of stress, meaning that people tend to show high level of stress when they need to redo their works. The hypothesis will be tested by checking the stress level when engineers redo their works because of changes or errors. An electroencephalography (EEG) sensor will be used to measure the stress level of engineers when they redo their works. For more accurate measure of stress, the stress level will also be measured by the galvanic skin response (GSR). This experiment is expected to prove that rework process is a severe stressor for construction professionals, which will contribute to lower productivity and poorer WLB. The finding will emphasize the importance of managing reworks in the construction industry, which will eventually help construction managers to control the level of employees' stress successfully.