Safety Climate in the Saudi Oil & Gas Industry

A deficient safety culture has been implicated in a number of organizational accidents. Today, many organisations that operate in hazardous industries with a high level of reliable / safe performance assess their safety culture regularly. The most common approach to measuring safety culture is to conduct a safety climate survey of the workforce. A safety climate survey typically assesses the workforces attitudes and perceptions about work pressure, communication, reporting, human error, safety systems, risk, and supervision and management commitment to safety. A review of relevant literature found that there has been a lack of research about safety climate in Saudi Arabias Oil and Gas Industry. This research project seeks to fill that gap. The Research Question this project will investigate is How does Safety Climate affect the safety performance of companies operating in Saudi Arabias Oil and Gas Industry? The objectives of this project are to: a) develop a safety climate questionnaire for use in Oil and Gas companies operating in Saudi Arabia, b) validate that safety climate questionnaire so that it can be used as a leading indicator of safety to identify safety problems before they become realised as accidents or near-misses, and c) provide companies operating in Saudi Arabias Oil and Gas Industry with benchmark data on safety climate so as to identify best practice. The research will involve a number of site visits to companies to negotiate research access, interview workers and managers, collect data using the questionnaire, and provide feedback to the participating organisations. Developing the questionnaire will also involve establishing its psychometric properties through statistical analyses. Research on safety climate in Saudi Arabias Oil and Gas industry offers potential to make advances in safety climate theory and impact safety management practice.