Determinants of Safety Climate in Industrial Settings: A Systematic Review of Measurement Instruments

TL;DR

This paper reviews safety climate measurement tools in industrial settings to identify common factors that define safety climate and improve their use in preventing accidents.

Contribution

The study synthesizes determinants of safety climate into a unified framework, enhancing comparability and effectiveness of safety interventions.

Findings

Safety climate determinants converge into four domains: Health and Safety Management, Organizational Safety Resources, Worker Involvement, and Working Conditions.

The identified domains are consistently supported by instruments with confirmatory structural validation.

The synthesis provides a conceptually coherent structural core for safety climate measurement.

Abstract

Background: Safety climate is widely used to explain and prevent occupational accidents in industrial settings; however, the field remains conceptually fragmented, with multiple measurement instruments coexisting without consensus on the core dimensions that define the construct, limiting the comparability of findings and the effectiveness of organizational interventions. Objectives: This study aims to identify, organize, and synthesize the determinants of safety climate reported in validated instruments applied in industrial settings through a systematic literature review. Methods: The review was conducted in accordance with the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, with searches performed in the Scopus and Web of Science databases, resulting in the inclusion of 27 empirical studies published between 2015 and 2025. Dimensions reported in the instruments were extracted, grouped by conceptual similarity, and integrated into a common structure. The synthesis examined determinant recurrence across instruments and interpreted the findings in light of the psychometric quality of the measures, as assessed using the COSMIN framework. Results: The results indicate that despite the diversity of scales, safety climate determinants derived from measurement instruments consistently converge into four domains: Health and Safety Management, Organizational Safety Resources, Worker Involvement, and Working Conditions. The convergence of these domains across independent instruments, considered alongside the methodological robustness of their validation procedures, indicates a conceptually coherent structural core predominantly supported by instruments with confirmatory structural validation. Conclusions: By integrating conceptual structure and measurement quality, this study contributes to reducing fragmentation in the literature and provides an empirical basis for the development, adaptation, and selection of safety climate instruments, with direct implications for research and safety management in industrial environments.

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