Organisational climate and employee health outcomes: A systematic review

Abstract Organisational climate, particularly safety climate, has been documented as a crucial element in promoting occupational health and safety. However, most previous studies have focused more on safety issues (e.g., injuries and accidents) rather than health outcomes (e.g., illnesses, stress, etc). A comprehensive review is also lacking in relation to understanding the organisational climate–health relationship between different levels of analysis, different data sources and different analytical procedures. We conducted a systematic review to investigate previous scholarly contributions to organisational climate and health. The reviewed articles were obtained from three databases: ISI Web of Knowledge, PsycINFO and EBSCOHost Academic Premier Search. After reading the abstracts and full texts, we included 56 articles in our review. We found that the influence of organisational climate on employee health has been supported in prior research. However, hypotheses at the individual level are more frequently supported than those at the organisational level. Even though most studies analysed self-reported data and, thus, possibly suffered from common method bias, half of the studies were explicitly or implicitly trying to reduce the bias. Studies with and without remedies for reducing common method bias yielded similar results, suggesting that common method bias has little impact on organisational climate research. Overall, almost no differences were found among the different organisational climate constructs. The current review includes several recommendations for future research.