Recent development in industrialization and global economy has contributed to the increased number of workplace
injuries and accidents. Safety culture has been seen as a central medium to curb the worrying trend of workplace
accidents. The term of safety culture has emerged from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986 and the concept has
been widely used until today. However, the conceptualization of safety culture suffers from several major drawbacks
such as no definite understanding of how safety culture is being defined and measured. This paper hypothesized that
higher levels of safety culture in the workplace will display lower numbers of accidents. Due to this concern, this
paper seeks to provide a clear conceptualization of safety culture, dimensions used to measure it and common research
methodology used in the previous safety research.
In the new global economy, workplace safety has become a central issue among companies all over the world.
It is becoming difficult to ignore that this trend has also been happening in Malaysia especially the manufacturing
sector. The worrying trend can be seen from the increasing number of workplace accidents reported by Department
of Occupational Safety and Health (DOSH), Malaysia in manufacturing companies. In recent years, researchers have
shown an interest in studying the role of safety leadership to reduce workplace accidents. It is found that safety
leadership plays a significant role in ensuring a safe and sound workplace. Due to this concern, this paper attempts
to provide a conceptualization of safety leadership from the perspective of Malaysia’s manufacturing sector. It is
proposed that positive safety leadership lead to a reduction of workplace accidents. In response to this matter, it is
hypothesized that the higher level of safety leadership will positively affect the lower level of workplace accidents.
A questionnaire from Wu et al. (2008) will be adopted to explain the conceptualization of safety leadership, where it
is expected that the concept of safety leadership practised in Malaysia’s manufacturing sector has a similar meaning
from the perspective of western researchers.
Individual factors have been considered to be a key issue to organizations’ performance and survival. Specifically, previous studies provide evidence that individual factors are closely associated with accidents in the workplace. Therefore, this study seeks to investigate the relationship between individual factors and workplace safety. 50 respondents have been randomly chosen from a manufacturing company in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. Data are collected using a survey and are analyzed using SPSS version 16.0. A descriptive statistic, cross tabulation, independent sample t-test and one-way between groups ANOVA are employed to interpret findings of the study. Findings show that employees’ perception on safety performance is at high level (Mean= 115, Standard Deviation= 17.73). Furthermore, the results of cross tabulation demonstrate that individual factors play a key role to determine the organization safety performance level. Another significant finding reveals that there is a significant difference of safety performance mean to two of individual factors namely gender and tenure of service. Individual factors namely gender, age, tenure of service and academic qualification give a significant impact to employees’ perception on safety performance.