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The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of safety participation as a mediator in the relationship between the six facets of safety management practices (i.e. management commitment, safety training, worker’s involvement, safety communication and feedback, safety rules and procedures, and safety promotion policies) and safety compliance.

A survey of 74 employees of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in the northern region of Peninsular Malaysia was carried out. Self-reported measures were used to obtain data on workplace safety dimensions and safety behavior. The partial least square structural model analysis was used to ascertain the proposed relationships.

The present study found that only three dimensions of safety management practices (management commitment, safety training, and safety rules and procedures) were significantly related to safety compliance. Of these, safety participation mediated the link between management commitment and safety training and safety compliance.

The small sample size may limit the generalizability of the findings. Second, the correlational nature of the study did not permit causation to be implied. However, despite these limitations, while safety performance can be theorized to trigger the establishment of safety management practices, such theoretical perspective tends to connote reactivity rather than proactivity of the decision-making process.

The study highlights the role of the voluntary behavior of employees in promoting a safe work environment. Business owners are recommended to provide safety training in which the employees are stressed on their crucial role in safety and use this knowledge to educate and convince their co-workers to work safely.

Literature indicates the lack of studies on safety research in SMEs. Furthermore, such studies are justified because SMEs are likely to have more risks of occupational accidents and injuries. More importantly, this research highlights the importance of the voluntary behaviors of employees (i.e. safety participation) in promoting a safe work environment. As SMEs tend to have limited resources to implement a comprehensive OSH management system, using the employees as the safety agents at work can be an effective way toward accomplishing safety performance.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for understanding the antecedents of emergency response performance.

Emergency response is vital in cases of emergencies, as prompt and speedy services determine the difference between life and death. Emergency responders normatively work in team and in concert to ensure that mitigation efforts can be accomplished to reduce loss of life and property. As such, it is imperative that emergency responders perform tasks at hand as efficiently as possible as a team.

The paper discusses possible antecedents that determine an emergency response team's performance and offers a conceptual framework based on Robbin's model of group behavior and the existing literature to explain emergency response team performance.

The paper presents an overview on emergency management, antecedents of an emergency response team's performance, and proposes a framework to investigate the antecedents of an emergency response team's performance.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the initial emergency response time of fire fighting teams in Malaysia.

In an emergency incident time is of the essence, and the basic philosophy of an emergency response agency is to respond as quickly as possible to minimize the loss of life and property damage. In the current study, emergency response performance refers to team members' speed in responding to emergency situations, which was measured as the time taken for the team members to get to the fire truck from the waiting room in selected fire stations in Malaysia. The data collection period lasted for five months.

This study found that the overall average initial emergency response time was 84 seconds, while the overall average weighted initial emergency response time was 3.71 seconds per meter. The current study has demonstrated that the average initial emergency response performed by fire fighting teams in Malaysia is apparently better than that reported by previous studies by other emergency responders.

This paper presents empirical evidence of the initial emergency response time of fire fighters in Malaysia, by taking into account the distance traveled by the responders. As such, the performance measure obtained gives a meaningful indicator. The finding of the current study is then compared to emergency response performance by other emergency response agencies in other countries.

In recent years, there were several incidents of fire in secondary schools in Malaysia. A study conducted by the Ministry of Education has found that there were outbreaks of fire in 22 primary and secondary schools and in institutions of higher learning for the year 1999 resulting in losses of RM 534,400. This study was carried out to identify fire safety conditions in residential colleges in a local Malaysian university. An audit approach as well as the use of questionnaire was adopted to collect primary data for the study. The audit results show that the overall fire safety condition was at 76 percent compliance level. The survey results showed that only predisposing factors such as knowledge, attitude and belief have a positive relationship with the fire safety behavior and lifestyle (p<0.5). The survey identified six important elements for fire safety and in ranking order they are: belief in the importance of fire safety, perception on the need for immediate response to fire incidence, knowledge in fire safety, attitude of occupants, social influence, and feedback on fire safety issues.

The purpose of this paper is to examine to what extent management practices in safety culture are effective in reducing workplace injuries.

Management practices are an important component of an organization's safety climate. The study was conducted in a major industrial zone in Malaysia. The management practices examined in this study were reward, training, management commitment, communication and feedback, hiring practices, and employee participation. In total, 68 companies participated in this study; the injury data provided by the companies were for three years and 24 musculoskeletal injuries were examined.

The multiple correlation was at 0.43 and the R² was 0.19. A significant linear relationship between management practices subscale and injury rates was obtained (F=2.28, p=0.14). Rewards, management commitment, feedback and selection were found to reduce injury rates. However, only feedback (t=−2.98) and employee participation (t=2.01) were significantly predicting the injury rates. Implementing good management practices does reduce injury rates.

Nevertheless, a positive relationship for participation with injury rates suggests that a re‐examination of these practices is necessary, as it may not be effective in reducing injury rates.

It may be posited that although frequency counts of injuries in the workplace do provide some indication of the extent of workplace injury; nevertheless they do not provide a true account of the severity of these injuries.

This paper presents empirical findings on the relationship between management practices and injury rates in the industrial sector in Malaysia

This paper aims to determine the influence of physical ability on initial emergency response performance among emergency response teams.

In an emergency incident, emergency responders are involved in vigorous physical activities. Previous attempts have demonstrated that job performance of emergency responders depends a great deal on their ability to perform strenuous physical activity. This paper examines the influence of physical ability namely weight, height, and cardiovascular endurance on emergency response performance among fire fighting teams in Malaysia. Emergency response performance was defined as team member's speed in responding to emergency situations. Data on team member's physical ability and emergency response time were collected for the duration of five months. The distance from the waiting room to the fire truck in each selected fire station was used to measure performance.

This study found that the team with higher average weight and cardiovascular endurance level had better initial response to emergency situations, contrary to the research hypothesis. But it is speculated that the relationship could be further understood by considering the proportion of fat in the body. The relationship between cardiovascular endurance and initial emergency response performance further validates and justifies the use of physical fitness test as a criterion for job performance of fire fighters.

This paper offers empirical evidence of emergency response performance in Malaysia. Specifically, it presents findings on the influence of physical ability measures on initial emergency response performance from a team perspective. In addition, the emergency response performance was measured by the distance traveled by the responders, which serves as a meaningful performance indicator.

The study investigates the effect of autocratic, democratic and transformational leadership styles on employees' organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). The study further examines the moderating role of leaders' emotional intelligence between leadership styles and OCB.

Questionnaires were used to collect data from 618 small and medium-sized enterprises' (SMEs) employees in Ghana. For this study, both simple random and convenient sampling were adopted in selecting respondents. Regression was used to test the hypotheses in the research model using IBM–Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS).

The results show that democratic and transformational leadership styles both positively predicted the OCB of SME employees, although transformational leadership has a more significant influence. On the contrary, autocratic leadership style was found to have an insignificant relationship with OCB of SME employees when the interactive effect of the various leadership styles and emotional intelligence were introduced into the model. The results also show that whereas leaders' emotional intelligence positively moderate the relationship between autocratic leadership style and OCB, the relationships between democratic leadership style and OCB and between transformational leadership style and OCB are not significantly moderated by leaders' emotional intelligence.

An examination of other prominent leadership styles (for example, the transactional leadership style and the laissez faire leadership style) could be key areas for future research as it is a potential limitation of this study. Similarly, the use of a Western leadership instrument could also be a potential limitation in the Ghanaian context, although these instruments and scales may be applicable. Future studies could also consider a longitudinal approach to give a more holistic picture of the effect of the leadership styles on OCB.

In general, the findings of the study support the idea that the autocratic leadership style affects SME employees' OCB both directly and indirectly through leaders' emotional intelligence. This study recommends that leaders of SMEs should focus on leadership styles that combine both result-oriented and people-centric behaviors to encourage SMEs' employees to engage in OCB.

This study provides firsthand information on the impact of autocratic leadership style, democratic leadership style and transformational leadership style on an employee's OCB from the Ghanaian SME perspective.