Safety Culture Transformation in Mega Projects: The Role of Leadership in Sustainable Performance

Megaprojects are known for their budgets exceeding one billion dollars, prolonged timelines, and a complex contractor’s management environment. They are at the center of industrial development, specifically in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region under initiatives such as the United Arab Emirates’ sustainability agenda and Saudi Vision 2030. Despite advances in technical controls and risk systems, megaprojects still struggle to prevent serious injuries and fatalities. This indicates that compliance alone does not create a mature safety culture. This paper reviews the literature on safety culture transformation, leadership accountability, and mega-project governance, generating lessons from global case studies such as the Macondo/Deepwater Horizon disaster, the United Kingdom’s cross-rail project, and Qatar’s World Cup construction programs. The analysis demonstrates that leadership accountability at board, project director, and site levels is an essential element for cultural maturity, shifting organizations from dependent or independent safety stages to interdependent, high- performing cultures. In this paper, a three-level accountability cascade framework is proposed to link executive governance with frontline behaviors. Implications are discussed for GCC megaprojects, where reputational, ESG, and legal pressures come together. The paper concludes that without executive-level ownership, safety culture transformation in megaprojects is becoming superficial.