The notion of safety culture and employee attitudes to safety within a UK North Sea and USA Gulf of Mexico offshore environment.

The objective of this thesis were threefold. Firstly, to build upon previous work by Alexander et al (1994) and Cox (1996), part of which was conducted offshore on the United Kingdom Continental Shelf (UKCS). That work addressed the identification, measurement and management of a safety culture and related employee perceptions. Secondly, to assess the development of health and safety management within a UK and USA offshore environment and thirdly, to assess differences in employee attitudes to safety within two distinct operating locations within the Chevron Corporation, a large multi-national organization The research strategy was formulated based on the available literature on the notion of safety culture and management's perception that although extensive resources had been devoted over many years in developing the existing health and safety management programme there had not been a process in place to maintain that investment. A comprehensive situational and behavioral audit was undertaken, complemented by a questionnaire and a series of focus groups. The data suggested that the regulatory framework within which both Business units operated is complex and in the case of the UK has largely been implemented in the last decade. Furthermore, the data also suggested that employee attitudes to health and safety were different within both locations and that the main reason for that is the difference in the health and safety regulatory regimes. It is suggested also that safety culture models or factors, which supposedly offer a constructed profile of safety culture are in essence a series of attitudes and behavioral nonns that individuals demonstrate within their unique organisational environment. Safety is complex and multi-faceted, in particular within an offshore environment and it is arguably somewhat meaningless to talk about attitudes towards safety in tenns of culture if in doing so there is the implication of a simple unitary concept.