The relationship between safety cuture perception and employee performance: A research on aviation maintenance personnel

Safety culture is an integral part of the aviation industry. The aviation sector where the smallest mistake can lead to great loss of life and property; is the transportation sector that attaches the utmost importance to the concept of safety and seriously implements it. In this context, safety culture applied in aviation institutions and enterprises is likely to affect employee performance. The purpose of this study is to determine and reveal the hypothesized causal and correlational relationship between perception of security culture and performance of aviation maintenance personnel. For this reason, a questionnaire form comprising of the measurement instruments and demographic questions were applied to 223 public and civil sector respondents working in Istanbul, Ankara, İzmir and Malatya provinces. The collected data were analyzed via IBM SPSS 20.0 for Windows. The measurement items were subjected to exploratory factor analyses and confirmatory factor analyses subsequent to the reliability analysis in terms of content and construct validity (p < ,05). Correlations and regression models were conducted through the latent variables acquired from the factor analysis. Correlation analyses demonstrated significantly positive high-level of correlations among safety culture and contextual performance, but no correlations among safety culture and contextual performance can be observed. Regression analysis resulted in a model whereby 7 % of the explained variance in perceived contextual performance is accounted for by safety culture and 37,4 % of explained variance in perceived task performance is accounted for by safety culture. Demographic- wise, the respondents differed in terms of their mean level of safety culture according to educational level and age but no difference was discerned regarding the tenure and gender variables. Also the respondents differed in terms of their mean level of personnel performance perception according to educational level, tenure and age but no difference was discerned regarding the gender variable.