Modelling Safe Operational Behaviour in Oil and Gas Industries through Occupational Safety Management and Collective Action Mechanisms

Abstract

In spite of continuous investments in safety management systems, compliance to regulations and risk control measures, safe operational behaviour is still a concern in the oil and gas production (OGP) industry. It is a multidisciplinary topic with various studies conducted from the perspective of safety climate, process safety, human factors, resilience, governance, and occupational safety and health, but the evidence is scattered in a variety of lines of enquiry. The goal of this review is: identifying and modelling the factors associated with safe operational behaviour in OGP environments. This is achieved by the synthesis of 20 peer-reviewed studies from 15 bibliographic sources. The most frequently cited sources of the reviewed studies included Safety Science and the Journal of Safety Research (15% each), followed by Reliability Engineering & System Safety (10%). Six themes were identified in the thematic synthesis: Process Governance and Safe Operational Behaviour had the most author-mentions in the subthemes, followed by Occupational Safety and Health, Organisational Ergonomics and Collective Action and Safety Resiliency. In the literature, there are robust associations between whole organisation learning, workforce capability, compliance, governance, risk management, and collective coordination and safety outcomes, but not as strong associations with individual interventions. The review also reveals that there is growing interest in interactions between technical systems and organisational processes, with fewer studies looking at the interaction in an integrated conceptual framework. A synthesis of both observations, the paper suggests an integrated model, which integrates Collective Action Theory with Occupational Safety and Health Theory to provide a wider basis for understanding and modelling safe operational behaviour in complex OGP operations. The paper's main findings are that collective action theory is a suitable model for understanding collective behavior by workers during an oil and gas production process and that the framework of process governance allows for the identification of factors that support workers' collective behaviour.