Impact of Organizational Culture and Perceived Process Safety in the UAE Oil and Gas Industry

In the last few decades, there had been a lot of accidents in the oil and gas industry throughout the world. This article reports a qualitative study of 30 employees employed in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) oil and gas industry. Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) culture is a concept which was studied in many researches. However, this research is set to examine how certain behaviors affect the safety performance in UAE's oil and gas industry. Four core themes that were drawn from the interviewee discussions of how safety culture, leadership safety behaviors, supervisory safety behaviors, and employee training on safety affect the employee's performance on safety. The emergent narratives on the safety culture showed that an employee was likely to perceive safety in the organization favorably if s/he believed that his/her role in ensuring process safety was critical. Moreover, results pertaining to supervisory safety culture showed that the safety culture promoted by a supervisor within his/ her role often set the standard for his/her subordinates constituted the benchmark against which all his/her subordinates rated their own idea and practice of safety culture. In addition, the findings confirm the important role played by safety leadership, which entails leader-follower interactions where the former influences the achievement of safety goals. Lastly, it was emphasized that safety training stimulated employees with negative or indifferent attitudes towards safety to be more actively engaged in safety matters in the organization.