The relationship between occupational safety culture and safe behavior: A research in the ship building industry

The worst outcome of the study is undoubtedly an occupational accident. Although it is not possible to eliminate occupational accidents completely, it is possible to minimize to the minimum level by some arrangements and improvements. Establishing safe working situation and conditions in order to reduce occupational accidents is considered as the basic function of organizations. At the same time, the main reason of the work accidents is the unsafe behavior of the employee. It is expected to develop unsafe behavior into safe behavior by developing a safe culture that is alleged to be related to behavior. Therefore, it is necessary to support the safe culture within the organization as well as the importance given to the technical improvements in the working environment. Ultimately, it is a cultural issue to make safe behavior a habit in all areas of life. In this study, the effect of the safety culture on the safe behaviour is tried to be questioned in the shipbuilding industry. The nine main hypotheses were determined. Sub-hypotheses have been constructed in order to contribute to the main hypotheses. These hypotheses are tried to be tested in terms of individual and organizational variables. In this study, qualitative and quantitative data were evaluated together. A safety culture questionnaire was applied to 600 employees, of which 505 were accepted as valid. Data were tried to be detected by using SPSS version 23.0. The main problematic of the study is to determine whether there is a relationship between safety culture and safe behavior. With the eight occupational health and safety experts working in the same sector, semi-structured focus group interviews were conducted within the framework of the basic hypotheses. The interview was aimed to provide support to the main hypotheses and the sectoral recommendations were evaluated. As a result, it is among the findings that there is a relationship between safety culture and safe behavior, which is supported by occupational health and safety experts.