Safety Culture: An Integrative Review

TLDR

Safety culture has become a growing concern in aviation and other high‑risk industries. This review aims to synthesize studies on safety culture and climate, discuss key indicators and assessment methods, and help researchers and practitioners improve and share safety culture practices. The authors performed a synthesis of diverse perspectives, discussed organizational indicators and assessment methods, and outlined issues for implementing safety culture assessment programs. The review found limited formal assessment of safety culture in aviation and significant disagreement among professionals about its definition and distinction from safety climate.

Abstract

Abstract Recent years have witnessed a growing concern over the issue of safety culture within aviation and other complex, high-risk industries. The purpose of this review is to summarize and integrate the numerous reports and studies that have been conducted to define and assess safety culture as well as the highly related concept of safety climate. Results of the review indicate that few formally documented efforts have been made to assess safety culture within the aviation industry. Furthermore, there exists considerable disagreement among safety professionals, both within and across industries, as to how safety culture should be defined and whether or not safety culture is inherently different from the concept of safety climate. We conducted a synthesis of these different perspectives. We provide a discussion of key organizational indicators of safety culture and the various methods commonly used to assess these factors. We also present issues that need to be considered when implementing a safety culture assessment program. The hope is that this review will enable researchers and safety professionals to better understand and assess safety culture and that it will facilitate the sharing of information and strategies for improving safety culture across organizations and industries.