Gatekeepers Under Pressure: A Comparative Analysis of Commissioning, HSE, and QA/QC Engineers in Engineering Project Delivery

Engineering projects depend on gatekeeper roles — Commissioning/start-up engineers, Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) professionals, and Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) engineers — whose functions are to enforce standards at the point of delivery. Despite their shared assurance mandate, these roles differ markedly in structural pressures, enforcement confidence, safety exposure, and workforce composition. This paper presents, to our knowledge, one of the first comparative analyses of all three gatekeeper roles within a single dataset, drawing on a global cross-sectional survey of engineering professionals (N = 335, 22 countries across six continents). A central finding concerns the daily enforcement experience of HSE professionals: 63% report frequent pushback when raising safety concerns, 58% report risk assessments being rushed or completed superficially, and 32% report pressure to accept higher safety risk than they deemed appropriate — all significantly higher than QA/QC counterparts, with medium to large effect sizes. The credential-enforcement gap offers a plausible structural explanation. Fifty-eight per cent of HSE professionals hold sub-degree vocational qualifications, compared with 5% of commissioning engineers and 10% of QA/QC engineers (χ²(2) = 35.836, p < .001). This places the role with the highest physical safety enforcement responsibility at the lowest position in the credential hierarchy, potentially reducing the symbolic authority available in enforcement interactions. Additional findings include commissioning engineers reporting the highest structural pressure and lowest hesitation to challenge; QA/QC engineers reporting a supportive culture yet paradoxically the highest hesitation to challenge; and HSE professionals showing concerning departure intentions despite high job satisfaction — consistent with role conflict theory. We introduce the concept of the credential-enforcement gap and discuss its implications for safety governance and organisational design.