Influence of Safety Culture on Employee Safety Motivation and Error Behaviour in Selected Petroleum Industries in Niger-Delta

Abstract

The study assessed the influence of safety culture on employee safety motivation and error behaviour in selected petroleum industries in the Niger-delta. Perceived process safety culture has significant impact on employees’ safety motivation and employee error behaviours in petroleum industries were the hypothesis tested for the study. Numerous empirical examinations states process safety culture failure as largely responsible for catastrophic occurrences in oil and gas platforms which has resulted in loss of lives, properties and caused diverse dangers to the environment. The study methodology is descriptive statistics utilising regression analysis. The field production / process plant operations workers of the Local/National and International Oil Companies were considered. The Population of the study: includes workers of the processing unit of ExxonMobil, Total Exploration & Production, Shell Petroleum Development Company, Agip Oil Company, Savannah Energy Public Limited Company (PLC), Network Exploration & Production, Frontier Oil, Aieteo Eastern Exploration & Production Company, Universal Energy Resources Ltd and Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). Population consist of one thousand workers of the processing unit of ten companies with a proportion of five selected International Oil Companies (IOCs) and five Local Oil Companies (LOCs) selected by convenience sample techniques with only 816 valid responses. The sampling technique was purposive, convenience and quota sampling. Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) IBM 20 was the software utilised for the analysis. The primary source of data collection was questionnaire. The questionnaire consists of Three (3) Sections and contains Thirty-seven (37) questions including the Socio-demographic data. Cronbach alpha coefficient from the reliability test carried out on the pre-test data showed an overall outcome of 0.872, which is considered very strong since and not far from 1.0. The study reveals that the Perceived process safety culture has no significant impact on employees’ safety motivation. Also, perceived process safety culture has a significant impact on employee error behaviours in petroleum industries. The study recommended that organisations should continue performing activities that keeps employees personally motivated. While employees must find ways to motivate themselves towards safety. Employee safety trainings should be organised to improve safety culture and avoid error behaviour.