title: Safety culture assessment in petrochemical industry: a comparative study of two algerian plants.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  To elucidate the relationship between safety culture maturity and safety performance of a particular company.
  
  
  METHODS
  To identify the factors that contribute to a safety culture, a survey questionnaire was created based mainly on the studies of Fernández-Muñiz et al. The survey was randomly distributed to 1000 employees of two oil companies and realized a rate of valid answer of 51%. Minitab 16 software was used and diverse tests, including the descriptive statistical analysis, factor analysis, reliability analysis, mean analysis, and correlation, were used for the analysis of data. Ten factors were extracted using the analysis of factor to represent safety culture and safety performance.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The results of this study showed that the managers' commitment, training, incentives, communication, and employee involvement are the priority domains on which it is necessary to stress the effort of improvement, where they had all the descriptive average values lower than 3.0 at the level of Company B. Furthermore, the results also showed that the safety culture influences the safety performance of the company. Therefore, Company A with a good safety culture (the descriptive average values more than 4.0), is more successful than Company B in terms of accident rates.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The comparison between the two petrochemical plants of the group Sonatrach confirms these results in which Company A, the managers of which are English and Norwegian, distinguishes itself by the maturity of their safety culture has significantly higher evaluations than the company B, who is constituted of Algerian staff, in terms of safety management practices and safety performance.
authors.affiliation: LRPI Industrial Prevention Research Laboratory, Institute of Health and Safety, University Hadj Lakhdar, Batna, Algeria.
authors.forename: Assia
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Boughaba
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, University Hadj Lakhdar, Batna, Algeria.
authors.forename: Chabane
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Hassane
authors.affiliation: LRPI Industrial Prevention Research Laboratory, Institute of Health and Safety, University Hadj Lakhdar, Batna, Algeria.
authors.forename: Ouddai
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Roukia
keywords: safety behavior; safety culture; safety management; safety performance