THE EFFECT OF OWNER-MANAGER’S SAFETY LEADERSHIP AND SUPERVISOR’S SAFETY ROLE ON SAFETY PERFORMANCE IN MALAYSIA’S MANUFACTURING SMEs

Abstract

Safety leadership has been advocated as the most appropriate approach towards injury prevention. Besides, supervisor safety role is also proposed to be crucial towards good safety performance in SMEs. Henceforth, this study aisled to determine the direct impact of safety leadership (safety concern, safety policy, and safety motivation) played by the owner-managers on safety performance within the SME manufacturers in Selangor, Malaysia. Furthermore, this study also evaluated the mediating effect of supervisor safety roles towards safety leadership and safety performance' relationship. The data was collected among 165 SME manufacturing workers from 37 factories and Partial Least Square – Structured Equation Model (PSL-SEM) was performed for data analyses. The results indicated that safety leadership in terms of safety concern, safety policy, and safety motivation has significant impact on safety performance. However, supervisor safety role does not mediate the relationship between safety leadership and safety performance. These results proved importance of direct safety management by the owner-managers and supervisors towards safety performance.Safety leadership approach delivered by the owner-managers could be the best way to improve safety performance despite all the limitation within SMEs.