Absenteeism is a major challenge for any organization in the current competitive world. Curbing absenteeism helps organizations achieve their targets and increases productivity. This study highlights the major causes of absenteeism in the production division of a garment industry under various dimensions, which influence on absenteeism like work environment, organizational culture, relation and co-operation, compensation and rewards, facilities, job satisfactory and security, and general factors. The Study helps to identify reasons for employee absenteeism in production division. Sample of 180 employees responses were considered for the study from the universe and the data were analysed, statistically. The study shows that the major factors like wages, other source of income, and bad relationship with supervisors were contributing to the major absence of employees from work. This clearly indicates that work environment, relation and co-operation, facilities provided by the organization and job satisfaction were the main components which are causing the employee absenteeism.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in India are currently facing the challenges of increased competitions. In such environment, labor retention is very important factor for competition and survival. In this context, appropriate leadership styles and Quality of Work Life (QWL) are very important factors for survival. Literature on QWL is limited to SMEs and several studies commonly correlated with only QWL dimensions but no study on QWL has association with Leadership styles. This empirical study is accomplished to predict QWL in relation to Transformational and Transactional leadership styles. The sample consists of 240 Mechanical Manufacturing SMEs in Bangalore, India. To draw the inference chi-square test, Pearson correlation and regression analysis was carried out for the collected data using Mini Tab14. The results indicate that 25% of SMEs have implemented good QWL, in 56.6% of SMEs have implemented Transformational leadership styles; QWL of SMEs has significant association with Leadership styles. QWL and Leadership styles of SMEs are independent of demographical factors of SMEs like age of the firms, size of the firms, and cost of the project. QWL dimensions like work environment, relation and cooperation, autonomy of work has a significant association with leadership style. For both transformational and transactional leadership style job satisfaction and job security has highest correlation coefficient.