The Mediating Effect of Community Leadership on Community Resilience Elements and Community Preparedness

Abstract

Disasters can occur in various forms with durations ranging from mere hours to days, weeks, or even months of prolonged damages and losses. Approaches taken to face such situation can build resiliency in a community. Lacking it, important community decisions will be made under the constraints of the crisis or disaster. A community with good disaster preparedness and local leadership engagement will be more capable of responding to, and managing disaster risks, which in turn will reduce damages and losses caused by disasters. This study was conducted to gauge the extent at which community leadership mediates the relationship between community resilience elements (community engagement, community education, and community awareness) and community preparedness. This was done using the results from questionnaires gathered from 318 respondents at Bukit Antarabangsa, Selangor, Malaysia. A structural equation modelling was employed to assess the validity and reliability of the instrument and thus test the research hypotheses. Based on the path model analysis, there are significant correlations to prove that community leadership is a viable partial mediator between community engagement, education and awareness, towards enhancing community preparedness. This also means that the presence of a capable community leader may well be a critical success factor to ensure that the respective community is better prepared and more resilient against disasters.

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“…In enhancing urban communities' disaster resilience, the community leader's role of ensuring interventions consistent with community needs was underscored by Chou and Wu (2014) [12]. The role makes sense with the position of Ridzuan, Kadir, Yaacob, Zainol, Abdullah et al (2020, p.7) that in a disaster, a leader's good personal coping capacity can generate attitudinal and behavioral outcomes among the community members, such as "readiness, compliance with law, cooperation, commitment and ethics" [14]. Whereas the stakeholders' attitude impacts post-disaster recovery projects' objectives [22], the criticality of a leader's political influence on successful uptake by stakeholders is magnified.…”

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“…Tingkat pengetahuan masyarakat tentang budidaya lele dengan metode biogreen sebelum dan setelah pembinaan melalui metode ceramah dan diskusi serta simulasi/ demonstrasi pada tabel 1. Ridzuan et al, 2020). Sebuah penelitian observational menggambarkan bahwa pemuka agama menjadi penggerak warga untuk menentukan kebijakan desa.…”

“…Tokoh masyarakat dilaporkan pada beberapa penelitian memiliki pengaruh pada perubahan perilaku masyarakat. Tokoh masyarakat akan menjadi guide to good behavior (Ridzuan et al, 2020).…”