Assessing safety culture in public sector organisations: A cross-national study

Abstract

An appropriate safety culture helps in enhancing safety performance in organisations. This study aims to investigate safety culture prevalence, assess individual sociodemographic parameters and accident experience effects on this culture and explore ways to enhance this culture in public sector organisations. A specially designed questionnaire was randomly distributed to 805 public sector employees in Dubai and Kuwait. Respondents were asked to rate their agreement with 24 statements representing seven safety culture dimensions. Student t-test and non-parametric tests were used to analyse the responses. Results revealed that employees in both governments reported experiencing a reasonably strong safety culture in their workplaces with safety attitude and teamwork receiving the highest while safety rules and workload receiving the lowest ranks among the seven safety culture dimensions. Moreover, male employees reported experiencing more accidents and scoring higher on most safety culture dimensions than female employees. Finally, employees who experienced accidents in the last five years reported a higher safety culture score than others. Accordingly, recommendations are put forward to enhance safety culture in public sector organisations.