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This article provide an empirical evidence  on the validity of a questionnaire designed to assess safety leadership, as well as safety knowledge-attitude-behaviour (Safety KAB) within Malaysia’s manufacturers which fall under small and medium (S & M) entrepreneurship. The questionnaire’s items were adapted from earlier research conducted in other study contexts. First, modified fuzzy delphi method (FDM) was applied for the research to obtain expert’s consensus regarding the content validity of all items. With some modifications to suit Malaysia’s SME manufacturing setting, the  5 point Likert-scale questionnaire consisting 42 items for measuring safety leadership and safety KAB were finalised. Subsequently, it was distributed to 100 production operators from the manufacturing S& M enterrpises in the Northern Corridor Economic Region (NCER) of Malaysia for pilot testing, 95 respondents had answered. They returned the questionnaires and 89 were best to be chosen for further procedures.The determined Cronbach’s alpha values were more than 0.90 for all items representing those variables, indicating that the questionnaire possessed high reliability and internal consistency. Subsequently, exploratory factor analysis (EFA) employing principal component analysis (PCA) extraction and varimax rotation was performed to determine the construct validity.  According to the PCA results, each item was retained as all the factor loadings were above the decided cut-off value, which is 0.65. Henceforth, the questionnaire is considered valid and reliabile to be used by future researchers.

Small and medium entrepreneurship (SMEs) is the backbone of countries’ development. Over the years, there have been a large percentage of workplace injuries by SMEs in Malaysia, including financial and other SMEs’ constraints, which inform of inexpensive approach, thus requiring effective approaches to boost their safety performance. SME is unique in terms of characteristics, such as flat organizational structure. Thus, the owner-managers and the supervisors’ safety management, respectively, are proposed to impact the safety performance. This signals the need to examine how owner-managers and supervisors’ safety management practices improve occupational safety performance in SME manufacturing companies. Grounded on the Theories of Accident Causation, the present study applied a research model examining the relationship between owner-manager safety management practices (safety concern, safety policy and safety motivation) and safety management of supervisors, and the overall safety performance in Malaysia’s SME manufacturing. The questionnaires were distributed to the production workers in SME manufacturing firms in Selangor, Malaysia. A total of 165 production workers participated in the study. The data collected were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modelling. Based on the analysis, the study revealed that safety concern, safety policy and safety motivation, each, have a meaningful relationship with safety performance, while the supervisor’s safety management did not significantly affect safety performance. Our results extend previous research by highlighting the importance of owner-manager safety management practices in driving safety performance and indicating how each dimension of safety management practices either enhances or inhibits safety performance. The present study is the first empirical research investigating the relationship between manager and supervisor’s safety management and safety performance in the SME manufacturing setting.

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.Most of the accident cases at work are caused by unsafe behaviour. Scholars have thus extensively researched factors of safe behavior.Safety leadership is stated as the most effective factor in safety behaviour. Besides, safety knowledge and safety attitudes are also found to influence safety behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature of the relationship between safety leadership, safety knowledge, safety attitude, and safety behavior, which has been found to be limited or rare in previous research.A self-administered questionnaire was applied and was distributed randomly to 140 SME manufacturing workers and they were analysed using the structural equation modelling partial least squares (PLS-SEM). The results prove that safety leadership has a significant effect on safety knowledge, safety attitude, and safety behaviour, with safety knowledge and safety attitude mediating the safety leadership-safety behaviour relationship. Consequently, the results provide a more in-depth view of the relationship between safety leadership and safety knowledge-attitude-behaviour via adapting social-cognitive theory and social learning theory in solving safety issues in SME. This study also provides a starting point for researchers to better understand how effective safety leadership is provided by supervisors in terms of improving worker safety and safety knowledge-attitude-behaviour.