Organizational safety culture, a comparison between Norwegian maritime transport industry and maintenance shipyards

Abstract

Numerous studies have been conducted into the safety of different maritime transportation systems, but no prior study on the safety culture and safe workplace practices in the ship repair and maintenance industry with special focus on offshore oil storage and processing units. This research aims to examine the safety culture and behavior in the Norwegian maritime maintenance industry by investigating the safety management and practices for the offshore oil storage and processing unit. Four databases- namely Oria, Google Scholar, Science Direct and Web of Science were used to search for the relevant materials for the studies. Keywords were combined to generate a Boolean string which was tested until it produced a search string that detected all key articles. Studies were selected to be included in the research work if they were published in the last 10 years (2012-2022) in a peer-reviewed journal if the published work is written in English and the full text is available when the article focused on the safety culture, the human factor and if they were not duplicated. The organizational safety culture, demanding working conditions, safety outcomes, and sector focus on safety regarding the safety culture and behaviour gathered from personnel working in the maritime maintenance and repair industry were extensively examined. The mean safety culture obtained in this study was 64.87 which shows that the Norwegian maintenance shipyard had a much higher safety culture index. However, two key issues that might further improve the safety culture in the Norwegian maintenance shipyard, include the adherence to safety guidelines and risk perception. Keywords: Safety culture, occupational, maintenance shipyard, maintenance culture, maritime maintenance, safety behavior, offshore oil storage tanker vessel.