Abstract. The success of Malaysian construction companies creates an opportunity to explore abroad. Past studies have shown that the difficulty of expatriates in adjusting to a new environment is the main aspect that leads to failure of assignments. The success in implementing an overseas assignment does not solely depend on an expatriate's technical expertise. The adjustment issues such as the interaction with the host nationals, and adaptability to the host country's culture also exert influence on the assignment. The research was conducted to identify the influence of executive expatriate general adjustment on assignment in host countries. The objective of the study was to identify adjustment influence factors relating to general adjustment abroad. Questionnaires were sent to Malaysian expatriate executives. Sixty four Malaysian expatriate executives from Malaysian construction companies overseas were involved in this study. The findings show interaction, social and living environment influences their adjustment during expatriation. Pre-departure training preparation aspects for expatriates is a good step before their departure to host countries.

Construction industry involves dangerous activities which few are exposed to a high risk of being fatal, injuries and damages to machinery and property. The construction of Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) and Light Rail Transit (LRT) have no exception to those accidents. The accident can bring economic burden to project stakeholders especially contractors and client. However, the accident cost is relatively complicated because of its “hidden” or “invisible” portion. Thus, this paper is aimed to determine the ratio of direct to indirect accident cost for railway construction projects. The study was conducted using self-administered questionnaire distributed to safety practitioners (n=11) at MRT and LRT construction projects. A total of 36 out of 43 reportable accident cases successfully collected for the study and were analysed with simple descriptive statistics. The findings show that the accident cost ratio for fatality is 1:1.22, permanent disability is 1:1.94, and temporary disability is 1:1.19. The overall accident ratio for all accident classifications is 1:1.23. The findings of the current study may impact future safety cost estimation process in determining the hidden accident costs for railway construction projects.

The risk should be managed crucially by any level of multidiscipline. Construction activities involved hazardous situations and unpredictable incidents during construction. There is a central issue triggered by sub-contractors’ tasks, i.e., failure to manage the risk management of main contractors effectively. Many factors contributed to the ineffectiveness of risk management implementation among sub-contractors, including lack of skills and expertise, lack of experience, and communication breakdown with the team. Therefore, this paper significantly provides the results of a survey of sub-contractors involved in the Northern construction projects. The goal of this study concerns the strategies to improve the effectiveness of sub-contractors in managing the risk on site. These are described with the results of the questionnaire survey analysis from 300 respondents. The respondents are from sub-contractors among G1 to G4 in the northern state of East Malaysia. Using the Kruskal-Wallis test, sixteen strategies were identified from the literature have been tested among the sub-contractors. The finding reveals that only ten approaches, i.e., effective site management and supervision, experience contractors, good feasibility studies, project understanding, thoroughly investigate vendor capabilities, frequent progress meetings, systematic coordination between parties, allocation enough resources, the right path, and proper identification of risk does give significant strategies to improve implementation of risk management among sub-contractors in the northern states of Malaysia.Keywords: Risk Management, Sub-Contractors, Strategies, Effectiveness, Construction

Safety and health issues are very sensitive matters as they deal with human life. Unfortunately, the financial aspect of safety and health issues have been neglected as everybody wants safety, but nobody wants to pay a single cent for it. Work injuries create significant economic and humanitarian consequences to our society especially to the construction of urban rail infrastructure projects, where they involve billion of Malaysian Ringgit (RM). Understanding injuries and accident costs are necessary to an organisation when set up a budget on safety and health control. The objective of this paper is to review the literature on occupational safety and health typology costs for these projects. A review of the literature identified a set of components of safety and health cost typologies involved for the construction of these projects. The safety and health cost typologies comprise the 11 possible components for prevention, evaluation and monitoring costs, five components for direct costs of an accident, 16 for indirect costs of an accident and one component for an extraordinary cost. Underestimated cost of occupational safety and health could threaten the progress and overall project cost control and that affects the successful completion of these construction projects.