Examining Organizational, Cultural, and Individual-Level Factors Related to Workplace Safety and Health: A Systematic Review and Metric Analysis

ABSTRACT

One major gap in existing health communication research is that few studies have synthesized findings from the literature to map out what are the key factors related to workplace (a) safety awareness, (b) safety risks, (c) health awareness, and (d) health risks. This study bridges the gap by systematically reviewing what these organizational, cultural, and individual-level factors are, and examine the impact of workplace safety and health publications using traditional and alternative metrics in academic and non-academic settings. Through an iterative process of coding, the results revealed six categories of organizational (management commitment, management support, organizational safety communication, safety management systems, physical work environment, and organizational environment), two cultural (interpersonal support and organizational culture), and four individual-level (perception, motivation, attitude, and behavior) factors. In terms of impact, articles that were most impactful in academia (e.g., high citation count) may not necessarily receive the same amount of online attention from the public. Theoretical and practical implications for health communication were discussed.

Acknowledgments

This research project was funded by the Workplace Safety and Health Institute, Occupational Safety and Health Division, Ministry of Manpower, Singapore and supported by the Workplace Safety and Health Council, Singapore. The authors would also like to thank Dr. Aravind Sesagiri Raamkumar from the National University of Singapore for crawling citation counts and alternate metrics data of the journal articles for analysis. He can be contacted at [email protected]

Notes

1. To be comprehensive in the search, we adopted the use of alternative terms (e.g., hazards, knowledge) in the search query to ensure that a thorough list of relevant studies would be included even if some adopted slightly different but related terms.