A review, simple meta-analysis and future directions of safety climate research in manufacturing organizations

Abstract

This article reviews 60 studies examining safety climates related to manufacturing. The study identifies several conceptual and methodological limitations associated with developing safety climate measurements, such as lack of a rigorous validation process, problematic sample sizes and composition. Within the reviewed studies, several factors were used to measure safety climates. Management commitment to safety and associated training and procedures were most common, followed by workers' attitudes and commitment. The most frequently used factors should reflect the fact that prevention of work-related accidents and injuries depends on both the organization's and workers' actions. Most studies made no attempt to establish discriminate and convergent validities of the tools used. We recommend that rather than construct more questionnaires, researchers should correlate safety climate constructs with existing safety performance metrics to establish convergent and discriminate validities. The accident rate in manufacturing industries is sufficient to measure safety performance and assess the discriminate validity of these tools.

Keywords: emergent themes; manufacturing industry; safety climate; safety culture; validity.