Evaluation of safety culture on international scale

Occupational accidents and occupational diseases are the leading incidents that cause the biggest financial and moral damage in working life. The importance of safety culture is often emphasised as a proactive prevention approach in reducing occupational accidents. Country culture is one of the headstones of organisational culture, which affects attitudes of people, norms, values and behaviours and which is also a part of working life. Organisational culture, which is a part of country culture, is a concept that is often used to define institutional shared values. Safety culture, which is an element composing organisational culture, is a lower real of institutional culture which is considered to affect safety, attitude, values and behaviours of employees regarding an organisation's working safely. At the present time, there is not a universally accepted model which formulizes to measure behaviours concerning safety culture. In order for safety culture to be positively created and developed, governments, employers and employees hold serious responsibilities. Fulfilling these responsibilities has a vital place in measuring safety culture levels of organisations, enhancing safety performance and providing its sustainability. In this study, a model to measure safety culture in organisations has been developed. In order to gain a perspective at an international dimension, by evaluating scales accepted in safety culture literature new scales (risk perception, the effect of beliefs, safety awareness, work pressure and priority, safety follow-up of managements, proactive safety management, sanction and incentive) have been developed and with these scales, measuring safety culture is aimed. This developed model has been applied in nine countries (The USA, The Emirates of Dubai, France, Georgia, England, Hungary, Poland, Singapore and Turkey) data aiming at measuring safety culture at an international scale has been collected and the differences have been revealed with the statistical analysis that have been done. In addition, the relation of safety culture between demographic structure and safety performance has been evaluated. The results of this thesis study contribute to improvement of work health and safety at all the sectors and on international scale, to development and sustainability of safety culture.