The mutual interdependences between safety and operations: A systematic literature review

Safety and operations are pivotal areas of industrial sustainability, often considered in a trade-off. Although focusing both on the workplace, safety and operations are still mainly tackled individually, without exploiting or even recognizing the mutual interdependencies between them. The literature nonetheless started addressing the safety outcomes deriving from the adoption of operational interventions, and the operational outcomes deriving from the adoption of safety interventions, but the general discourse still lack a complete overview and a managerial perspective. The present study provides a systematic literature review, investigating the mutual interdependences between safety and operations, critically revising the extant knowledge from an industrial sustainability perspective. We identified several relationships considering different operations and safety-related aspects, while also recognizing factors moderating or mediating the relationships. The analysis of the literature underlines the need for a more sustainability-oriented integrated approach toward the identification and evaluation of outcomes, highlighting several still open issues and offering possible future streams of research. Particularly, the literature still needs to address the mutual relationships between safety and operations from a sustainability perspective and shortcomings are identified concerning the investigation of contexts, climates, specific interventions, and the decision-making process, above all from an empirical viewpoint. The study provides both academic and practical contributions, by analysing the current knowledge and offering insights to support the adoption and the evaluation of safety and operational interventions.