The relationship between safety culture and safety climate and safety performance: a systematic review

Abstract

Introduction. There is a close relationship between safety culture and safety climate and safety performance. However, the details of this relationship are somewhat unclear, due to different attitudes toward safety culture and safety climate, and the use of various tools for their evaluation, and various measures of safety performance. Methods. In this study, articles published in English from 2005 to 2017 were selected from various databases. Then, certain journals in the field of safety were specifically searched using the keywords ‘safety and safety performance’, ‘safety climate and safety performance’, ‘safety culture and safety performance’, ‘safety climate and safety outcome’, ‘safety culture and safety outcome’, ‘safety culture and injury and fatalities’ and ‘safety climate and injuries and fatalities’. Results. In the current article, the role of safety culture and safety climate in improving safety performance was evaluated in 31 selected studies. It seems that reactive criteria and safety compliance is more consistent with safety climate and safety culture. Conclusions. The findings emphasized that increasing the level of safety climate and safety culture could be effective in reducing incidents and improving safety performance indicators.

Keywords:

• safety culture
• safety climate
• safety performance
• accident rate
• safety compliance
• safety participation

Acknowledgements

This study was conducted as part of Haji Omid Kalteh’s PhD thesis at Tarbiat Modares University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Seyyed Bagher Mortazavi

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by National Iranian Gas Company.