The Impact of Safety Management, Organizational Commitment and Risk Management on Project Performance in China’s Construction Industry: The Moderating Role of Project Complexity

Abstract

China's construction industry is transitioning from rapid expansion to high-quality development, prompting attention to how safety management, organizational commitment, and risk management jointly predict project performance under increasing project complexity. This study systematically reviews 102 empirical studies (2013-2024) retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, and CNKI, employing narrative synthesis and thematic analysis. The review reveals that safety management and organizational commitment drive performance through two complementary pathways-compliance-based and commitment-based-while risk management serves as the integrating mechanism calibrating the balance between them. Disaggregating project complexity through the TOE framework, the review finds that technical and organizational complexity weaken the compliance pathway but amplify the commitment pathway, whereas environmental complexity simultaneously heightens the need for resilience and erodes the psychological foundations of commitment; a resilient safety culture buffers these negative effects. This review contributes an integrated driver-adaptation-contingency framework and a TOE-based contingency matrix, while identifying critical gaps including the absence of an integrated empirical model and a scarcity of longitudinal designs.