The role of safety management system in safety culture in an oil and gas exploration and production company in Asalouyeh, Bushehr Province, Iran, in 2015

Background: One of the necessities of industrial societies is the application of developed measures/strategies for the prevention of occupational incidents in industrial companies. The present study was conducted with the aim of determining the role of the safety management system on safety culture of an oil and gas exploration and production company. Materials and Methods: This study was conducted on 240 participants, chosen through simple random sampling, based on the research goals, statistical society size, and the Krejcie and Morgan table. For data collection, the Safety Management System Questionnaire, with a Cronbach&rsquo;s &alpha of 0.96, and the Safety Culture Questionnaire, with a Cronbach&rsquo;s&alpha of 0.91, were utilized after determining their validity. The gathered data were analyzed using SPSS and LISREL softwares. Results: First level confirmatory factor analysis was performed with the use of LISREL package on 5 factors of encouraging/motivating employees to observe safety tips, educating employees on safety tips, safety policies in organizations, safety control in organizations, and urgent planning in organizations. The results showed that all the indices on obtained values were very desirable. In addition, the results of this research indicated that there was a statistically positive, meaningful relationship between the variable of safety management system and its components (i.e., safety policies, employees&rsquo; motivators, safety education, urgent prevention plans, and internal control), and safety culture (P<0.01). High education levels of the employees had meaningful impacts on the safety management system (P<0.01).However, there was no statistically significant relationship between the education level and occupational background of the employees and the company&rsquo;s safety culture (P>0.05). Conclusions: The results of the present paper proved that the safety management system and its components play an important role in the development of the safety culture of an oil company. Therefore, notifying the related authorities of this fact in order to establish a safety management system is a vital issue.