Assessing safety climate in construction workplaces: A three-step review of individual-level and organizational-level factors

Abstract

Background

The construction industry has been struggling with high rates of accident and fatality. Safety climate helps construction firms build up safety capability and has received enormous attention from the academia and practitioners. However, it still lacks the systematic review on safety climate in construction workplace, especially from the perspective of organizational-level factors.

Objective

This study attempts to explore the latest research progress and future research directions of safety climate in construction workplace from the multilevel perspective.

Methods

This study adopted a three-step literature review approach including bibliometric review, scientometric analysis, and qualitative discussion. The journals, keywords, co-authorship network, and co-citation network were examined.

Results

Three research mainstreams of safety climate in construction workplace (i.e., assessment, individual-level factors, and organizational-level factors) were identified in the co-occurrence network of the keywords. Co-authorship analysis reveals that Dongping Fang, Albert P. C. Chan, and Helen Lingard were the top three prolific authors in this domain. Six groups existed in the co-authorship network and 3 clusters were found in the co-citation network.

Conclusions

It is necessary to develop adaptive methods and dimensions for measuring safety climate in construction workplace. More individual-level factors of safety climate in construction workplace should be further explored. The interactions and influencing mechanism between the organizational- and individual-level factors need to be further clarified. This study may benefit both the academic community and safety policymakers by highlighting the critical factors of safety climate and providing the directions for initiating future studies related with safety climate in construction workplace.