How Does Organizational Culture Affect Safety Performance? The Moderating Role of Workforce Skills and Management Implications

Abstract

This literature review examines how organizational culture affects construction safety performance, focusing on the moderating role of workforce skills. Synthesizing empirical studies from 2015–2025 across major construction economies, the review finds that safety performance measurement has shifted from single accident indicators to multidimensional assessments integrating behavioral compliance, safety climate, and outcomes. While IoT and AI have improved measurement accuracy, they raise data privacy and algorithmic bias concerns. Organizational culture-particularly leadership, institutional execution, and penetration effects-positively drives safety performance, yet cross-cultural dynamics and project-level synergy remain underexplored. Workforce skills show a contradictory moderating role: skills generally enhance safety behavior, but high-skilled workers may exhibit overconfidence bias or circumvent inefficient safety measures, suggesting a nonlinear relationship. Drawing on recent evidence from 2023–2025, the review proposes a “culture-skills-performance” contingency model and outlines future research directions including cross-cultural assessment, longitudinal tracking, and technology-synergy effects. Management implications include targeted interventions for high-skilled workers, subcontractor cultural integration, trust-building before technology deployment, and regulatory shifts toward multidimensional indicators.