**1. Introduction**

Occupational safety and safety performance can provide competitive advantage to the firms [1] and have has become a prominent area of research in the last three decades [2,3]. The focus of this research is to identify safety-related outcomes and to provide guidance for improving health and safety in organizations. An inadequate safety management system is the root cause of the majority of industrial disasters [4]. Hence, organizations' adoption of safety management systems is linked with their attempt to achieve performance excellence. Safety performance is one of the key factors for gaining a competitive advantage in today's rapidly globalizing world. Effective preventive measures like safety management systems or behavior-based system approaches can help in the reduction in occupational accidents.

According to the most recent data on workplace health and safety, there are currently 2 million people who believe their illnesses were made worse by their employment, and each employee loses an average of 30 million days (1.3 days) every year because of illness or injury [5,6]. This is a result of potential carelessness on the part of the companies in maintaining safety procedures. Some businesses fail to give health and safety the priority it needs, despite the clear necessity for proactive management. This could be the result of insufficient staff resources or a lack of expertise, skills, and motivation. However, employee safety management and alertness are the keys to reducing the ratio of work-related illnesses and accidents at work. Safety management relates to the real procedures, duties, and responsibilities involved in staying safe [7,8]. Safety consciousness, on the other hand, is the awareness of risks and the vigilance for danger. It has a strong

**Citation:** Saleem, F.; Malik, M.I. Safety Management and Safety Performance Nexus: Role of Safety Consciousness, Safety Climate, and Responsible Leadership. *Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health* **2022**, *19*, 13686. https://doi.org/10.3390/ ijerph192013686

Academic Editor: Delfina G. Ramos

Received: 2 September 2022 Accepted: 17 October 2022 Published: 21 October 2022

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**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

influence on the actions of an individual because of his desire to remain alive and uninjured. There is always a need to develop safety consciousness because most injuries can be traced to someone's lack of safety consciousness [3,9]. It is a key predictor of safety outcomes that has attracted limited attention.

According to Kirwan [8], safety management is related to all practices that are associated with remaining safe, which includes actual practices, roles, and functions. Safety management is a sub-system of organizational management systems that are integrated into the organization and has a focus on controlling the hazards that can negatively affect the health and safety of employees [4]. Safety management systems not only implement policies and procedures, activities that are required to control the hazards, but also comply with the existing legislation applicable to the organization. The safety management system is an important antecedent of a safety climate [3,4] and the development of safety consciousness in employees. A safety climate is the shared perception of employees regarding the state of safety of their organization [10]. Similarly, safety consciousness is the awareness of an individual regarding the safety issues and concerns of an organization [11]; this awareness can be at both cognitive and behavioral levels [4]. Neal et al. [12], and Vinodkumar and Bhasi [4], have considered safety climate as a factor that influences the safety performance (including safety compliance and safety participation) of an organization. de Koster et al. [13] identified safety consciousness as an antecedent of the safety performance of employees in an organization. Based on social system theory (SST), social identity theory (SIT), and social exchange theory (SET), safety consciousness and safety climate are both proposed as mediators for the safety management and safety performance relationship.

A responsible leadership role in safety management and performance relationship is implicit as the majority of organizations' central goal is to ensure the value of safety is in the minds of employees [14]. The personality, values, and choices that employees make, the people they trust, the appeals they respond to, and the way they invest their time and energy in an organization are the outcomes of the values of leadership [14,15]. Based on social identity theory (SIT) and social exchange theory (SET), responsible leadership is proposed as moderator for the safety consciousness and safety performance and safety climate and safety performance relationships.

The importance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), especially in developing countries, cannot be denied. SMEs are considered a major contributing sector to the economic development of emerging and developing economies. Similar to other developing and emerging economies, most businesses in Pakistan are SMEs [16,17]. According to one report, about 99% of economic establishments are SMEs and their GDP contribution is 40% with 26% exports from the manufacturing sector [18]. The majority of firms in the pharmaceutical industry of Pakistan are SMEs [19]. Even though safety management and its outcomes have been researched and reported from various parts of the world, there is not much evidence available from small and medium-sized pharmaceutical firms in Pakistan, where safety performance is yet to get the priority it deserves.

The aim of the current investigation is to identify the impact of safety management practices on safety performance while taking safety consciousness and safety climate as mediators and responsible leadership as the moderator in pharmaceutical firms in Pakistan. This investigation is attempting to contribute to the literature in three ways: first, by empirically investigating a comprehensive mediated moderation model of safety management and safety performance; second, by generalizing the safety management and safety performance investigations that are majorly focused on developed countries to a developing country; and last, by focusing on the pharmaceutical industry of Pakistan.
