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Home > HCAS > HCAS_PUBS > HCAS_JOURNALS > TQR Home > TQR > Vol. 24 > No. 12 (2019)

 

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Health, Oil and Gas, Qualitative Research, Safety and Environment (HSE), Semi-Structured Interviews, United Arab Emirates (UAE)

Author Bio(s)

Mohamed Ali Al Mazrouei is a DBA student at College of Business, Abu Dhabi University, United Arab Emirates. He holds an MBA from the Higher College of Technology, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. He holds a bachelor’s degree of Mechanical Engineering from the University of Columbia, Missouri, United States of America with a Dean’s Recommendation of Honors and has over 15 years of experience in the field of oil and gas industry. Working for the 4th largest refinery in the word (ADNOC Refining) provided him with huge experience with different ISOs’ and APIs’ standards. In the same work field, he is maintaining the refinery assets’ which estimated at 15 billion U.S dollar. He is currently working in ADNOC Refining as Maintenance Vice President. His research interests are in the areas of understanding process safety in the modern process industry: psychometric properties and relationship with safety culture. Correspondence regarding this article can be addressed directly to: maalmazrouei@adnoc.ae.

Khalizani Khalid received a PhD in Business Administration from the MARA University of Technology, Malaysia. She is presently an Assistant Professor in the College of Business, Abu Dhabi University, UAE. Her research interest includes organizational management, safety and health, human resource management, behavioral decision-making, sustainability, technology management, and vocational education. Correspondence regarding this article can also be addressed directly to: drkhalizanikhalid@gmail.com.

Ross Davidson received his PhD from the Open University, UK. He is presently an Assistant Professor with the College of Business, Abu Dhabi University, UAE. His research interests focus on the co-creation of safety, international human resource management, organizational learning in the international setting, and leadership. Correspondence regarding this article can also be addressed directly to: ross.davidson@adu.ac.ae.

Salam Abdallah is an IS&T academic and practitioner. Dr. Abdallah has a PhD in Information Systems from Curtin University of Technology, Australia. He is also an active researcher in the field of Information Systems and has published articles in local and international conferences and journals. Correspondence regarding this article can also be addressed directly to: salam.abdallah@adu.ac.ae.

Acknowledgements

This study is conducted for a doctoral dissertation in Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. (ADNOC). The authors would like to express their sincere gratitude to this company and all the participants for co-operating in this study.

Publication Date

12-26-2019

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.46743/2160-3715/2019.3971

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