Safety leadership: A bibliometric literature review and future research directions

The field of safety leadership, despite significant growth, remains fragmented. This paper aims to consolidate this field by conducting a bibliometric review of 2,098 articles and 86,495 secondary documents to provide a comprehensive view of safety leadership research. Co-citation analyses revealed three foundational knowledge clusters: leader roles in safety climates and systems; mechanisms of leadership influence on safety outcomes; and the theoretical/empirical foundations for safety leadership. Additionally, bibliographic coupling analyses spotlight five emerging frontiers: leadership practices and safety climates; enabling safety performance and behaviors; holistic and contextualized perspectives informing safety leadership; multilevel lenses of leading safety climate/culture; and active, social, and transformative elements of safety leadership. We synthesize these findings to propose a future research agenda aimed at fostering both theoretical and empirical advancements of safety leadership research.