Exploring the research on managers’ safety commitment through the prism of leadership. Part 1: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

In the safety literature, managers' commitment to safety has been recognised as an important concept that can play a central role when organisations strive to improve safety performance in the context of process safety, as well as beyond. The concept of managers' commitment to safety is closely intertwined with the concept of leadership, as leadership style represents an important way managers can express their commitment to safety. However, research on this niche field remains scarce and fragmented. To gain a holistic overview and an objective understanding of how research on mangers’ commitment to safety has evolved over time, we conducted a bibliometric analysis (Part 1). By employing different types of co-citation analyses, we gain insight into the knowledge base and determine the intellectual structure of research. In addition, we used bibliographic coupling and co-word analysis to identify recent publications that constitute the research front and to highlight the most important key terms in recent publications to identify possible future directions in which this research field might evolve. The distribution analysis of the publications reveals that publications gained momentum after 2010. The results show that publications primarily draw knowledge from three major disciplines: safety science, management and organisation, and psychology. This indicates the interdisciplinary nature of this research topic. Further, results suggest that recent publications explored the concept of safety commitment not only in the context of climate and culture, which was common in the past but also directly with managers and their leadership, indicating the trend in future research. The bibliometric analysis outlines the intellectual structure of research on this topic, recaps the evolution of the research topic over time and highlights possible directions in which this research field might develop in the future. To gain a deeper understanding of the research topic, we conducted a systematic literature review, which is presented in the second paper (Part 2).