Organizational culture is closely related to risk management of an entity and is often an underlying reason for large-scale accidents in organizations. Successful performance, especially in a high-risk industry as aviation, can be reached by developing transparency in safety issues, practices, and existing safety measures. Safety culture is a concept difficult to measure accurately. Previously, questionnaires and interviews were most commonly used to measure safety values and beliefs recognized as a basement layer for the overall safety culture in organizations O'Connor (2011).
The paper provides a longitudinal study of sentence analysis in terms of safety culture dimensions and sentence characteristics. Also, it presents the analysis of the annual reports of the period from 2014 to 2016 of the five largest European airlines primarily focusing on commercial aviation and civil passenger transport. Content analysis was used to analyze the sample of fifteen annual reports (three annual reports for each of the airlines) allowing to categorize the disclosures under safety culture dimensions and create a foundation for further quantitatively-supported assessment of safety culture in the aviation industry. The additional analysis discovered relationships among individual safety information sentence characteristics in the annual reports. The risk-related disclosures observed are shown to be explained by the confluence of agency theory, legitimacy theory, and resources-based perspectives.