Managerial practices and employee satisfaction in Asian Small and Medium Enterprises "SME": The case of Malaysia

This research examines the premise of effective managerial practices and its impact on organizational productivity and employee satisfaction within the Malaysian Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) context. Since employee is the main asset of a given organization, and the dominant factor in organizational competitiveness, managerial practices is found to be highly correlated to employee satisfaction. The four variables considered in this paper for having an impact towards employee satisfaction are job involvement, teamwork, trust level between employee and employer, and work environment. Based on this research, it is found that managerial practices have an impact on employee satisfaction level, which is highly related to employee performance; employee performance and impacts organization performance. This study further concluded that all of the proposed variables examined in this research tend to have a significant impact on employee satisfaction within Malaysian SME's. As a result, this research recommends that such managerial practices to be takan into consideration not only within SME's but across South-East Asian organizations with similar size and characteristics. Such assertion is because of cultural similarities between Malaysia and neighbouring ASIAN countries