آیا سبک رهبری تحول گرا بر نگرش کارکنان نسبت به شیوه های ایمنی مواد غذایی تأثیر می گذارد؟

The objectives of this study were to examine whether transformational leadership style (TL) and organizational climate (OC) impact employees’ attitudes and intentions to follow safe food handling practices. We also set out to investigate the moderating effect of food safety certification on the relationships among TL, OC, and employees’ attitudes and intentions to follow food safety practices in restaurants. Questionnaires were distributed to restaurants in one state. Structural equation modeling techniques and multiple group analysis were used. The results of this study indicate that TL did not impact employees’ attitudes and intentions. However, TL significantly impacted OC, and OC significantly impacted employees’ attitudes and intentions to follow safe food handling practices; additionally, employees’ attitudes significantly impacted intentions to perform safe food handling practices. Furthermore, the moderating effect of food safety certification on the relationships among TL, OC, and employees’ attitudes and intentions was also significant. The results of this study not only provide a theoretical framework but also present more detailed diagnostic information regarding the impact of TL and OC on employees’ attitudes and intentions to follow safe food handling practices.

Serving safe food in foodservice establishments is especially important in the prevention of possible foodborne illness (FBI) outbreaks. Poor practices related to safe food handling, such as improper temperatures, improper hygiene, and cross-contamination, are significantly related to FBI outbreaks (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011, FDA, 2010 and Pilling et al., 2008). Pilling et al. (2008) have suggested that poor practices related to food handling are the result of employee noncompliance. A total of 816 FBI outbreaks with 80,682 reported cases were associated with food workers (including individuals who harvest, process, prepare, and serve food) between 1927 and the first quarter of 2006 (Greig et al., 2007). Even though the exact numbers and causes of foodborne disease outbreaks in the restaurant industry are not known, the number of FBI outbreaks associated with food workers appears to be increasing (Greig et al., 2007). While the health inspectors and inspection processes are a vital part of ensuring food safety in restaurants, restaurant managers may play an even more important role in the food safety of the restaurant industry because managers spend much more time involved in the operation. Managers and supervisors could serve as role models to their employees by strictly adhering to food safety rules and by keeping their work sites clean (Arendt et al., 2011 and Nieto-Montenegro et al., 2006) because if the managers think their workplaces and eating places must be clean and sanitary, they are more likely to make efforts to enforce the Food Code and provide their employees with food safety training programs and practices. In addition, some researchers (Arendt and Sneed, 2008, Griffith et al., 2010a, Griffith et al., 2010b and Powell et al., 2011) have found that the supervision in restaurants is a key factor in employees’ motivations to adhere to safe food handling practices. The authors further suggested that the context of the organization should be considered, such as leadership programs, food safety management systems, food safety environments and organizational structures. In addition, the study conducted by Arendt et al. (2011) identified four factors that serve to motivate retail foodservice employees to follow food safety practices: (1) communication between employees and supervisors, (2) rewards and punishments, (3) resources, and (4) intrinsic motivators, such as feeling, responsibility, satisfaction, etc. Although many factors are considered to influence employees’ motivations for following food safety practices, past studies in the area of food safety have not examined the influence of TL and OC on employees’ internal motivations to adhere to such practices, rather they have focused on monetary and other tangible rewards (external motivators). Among different styles of leadership, the impact of servant and relational leadership styles also have not been examined with respect to food safety. While the servant leadership style primarily focuses on employees increasing their autonomy, personal growth, and well-being (Dierendonck, 2011 and Stone et al., 2004) and the relational leadership style focuses on the nature of the relationship between managers and employees (not based on hierarchy) (Uhi-Bien, 2006), TL focuses on organizational objectives (tasks). In other words, transformational managers empower and support their employees, thereby enhancing their commitment toward the organizational objectives. Therefore, this study explored managers’ individual considerations towards motivating their employees and the ways in which managers inspire and stimulate their employees’ attitudes and behavioral intentions to follow food safety practices (organizational objectives). Previous studies (Frash et al., 2005, Mitchell et al., 2007, Pilling et al., 2008 and Powell et al., 2011) have identified barriers/failures that affect employees’ food safety practices. Such examples include pressure with respect to time, inadequate facilities and supplies, lack of accountability, lack of involvement of managers and coworkers, and organizational failure to support food safety practices. These barriers/failures are related to the workplace environment, its conditions and climate including the degree to which managers are involved. To mitigate barriers and encourage the adherence to workplace food safety practices, certain organizational behaviors have been suggested, including providing supervisory and peer support, adequate resources, training, organizational support, and an appropriate management culture (Frash et al., 2005, Griffith et al., 2010a, Griffith et al., 2010b, Medeiros et al., 2012, Murphy et al., 2011 and Powell et al., 2011). In addition, Mitchell et al. (2007) said, “researchers in the food safety arena need to pay more attention to understanding the ‘insider’ perspectives of the individuals whose behavior they are intending to change.” However, there is no empirical study or theoretical model to support that these suggestions are effective in restaurants that use relevant organizational theories. Accordingly, additional research about the contextual and organizational influences on employee food safety handling behavior is needed (Mitchell et al., 2007). Organizational food safety performance (i.e., foodservice sanitation inspection scores/grades given by health departments) is an indicator of a restaurant's sanitary conditions (Lee et al., 2012), which are mostly maintained by the frontline employees. Thus, managers must identify possible factors that will influence employees’ attitudes and intentions to follow food safety practices within their workplaces. As a result, this study examined the impact of barriers and suggestions related to the insider perspectives of the managers and organizational influences on food safety practices in restaurants. Specifically, the purpose of this current study was to examine the effect of the previously unexplored theory of TL and OC on employees’ attitudes and intentions to adhere to food safety practices. Furthermore, this study investigated the moderating effect of food safety certification on the relationships among TL, OC, and employees’ attitudes and intentions to follow food safety practices in restaurants. This study will provide practical guidelines for changing food safety behaviors in restaurants, and it should be useful in creating tailored training programs designed to improve employees’ food safety practices (i.e., food code compliance). Furthermore, this study identified how employees think about their work environment and TL. Thus, the results of this study will be useful in developing an appropriate food safety climate in workplaces and in improving the relationship between managers/supervisors and frontline employees. In addition, this study will help managers/supervisors better understand employees’ attitudes and intentions to follow food safety practices and, in turn, maximize employees’ food safety performance. Therefore, the results of this study will provide practical recommendations and possible solutions for improving restaurants’ sanitary conditions, thereby reducing FBI outbreaks in the restaurant industry.

While the sample precluded making generalizations that apply to the industry as a whole, it appears that, for this study sample, overall employees’ attitudes and intentions to follow food safety practices were significantly influenced by their perceptions of OC, which in turn, was influenced by their response to TL. Although the effect of TL did not significantly impact employees’ attitudes and food safety behavioral intentions, it was statistically significant on impacting OC. Therefore, managers should focus on developing and creating an appropriate climate to promote safe food handling practices. 5.1. Theoretical and practical implications To examine the causal relationships among employees’ perceptions of their managers’ TL, OC, employees’ attitudes, and behavioral intentions to follow safe food handling practices in restaurants, this study provided a conceptual model to investigate employees’ intentional influences on food safety performance. The constructs of OC and TL were used as antecedents of employees’ attitudes toward food safety practices based on the strongly established relationship between attitudes and behavioral intentions toward a specific behavior. While many previous researchers (Frash et al., 2005, Griffith et al., 2010a, Griffith et al., 2010b, Mitchell et al., 2007, Pilling et al., 2008 and Powell et al., 2011) have mentioned barriers and suggestions for employees’ food safety practices in the workplace, they did not provide any theoretical model with empirical evidence. The results of this study provide a theoretical model for the restaurant industry and contribute to further understanding of employees’ intentional influences on their safe food handling practices in the workplace. In other words, the results of this study theoretically explain how TL and OC impact employees’ attitudes and intentions to perform a specific behavior (i.e., safe food handling practices) in restaurants. This conceptual model is useful in examining the causal relationships among employees’ perceptions of their managers’ TL, the OC, employees’ attitudes, and behavioral intentions to perform a specific behavior in other industries. These behaviors may include green practices in the workplace of any segment of the hospitality or service industry. The results of this study can support managers in their efforts to understand and improve employees’ intentions to follow food safety practices in the workplace. Specifically, one of the results indicated that uncertified employees were more likely to be influenced by the OC. This implies OC played an essential role in stimulating employees’ attitudes and intentions toward safe food handling practices. Therefore, this study suggests that instead of managers’ direct involvement in employees’ food safety practices, managers are encouraged to establish a favorable safe climate that provides standards of food safety and triggers their employees’ attitudes and intentions. Furthermore, another result of this study indicated that employees with food safety certification had better attitudes and greater intentions to follow food safety practices than did employees with no certification. Therefore, this study suggests that managers should provide more opportunities for frontline employees to obtain food safety certification, and offer more on-site food safety training programs. If employees’ food safety behaviors or food safety certifications will offer opportunities for promotion, reviews of job performances, bonuses, pay increases, gift certificates, and shift preferences (Mitchell et al., 2007), then employees with no food safety certification will be more motivated to obtain food safety knowledge and perform food safety practices in the workplace. In addition, this study will be helpful in providing practical guidelines for determining what is needed to support health-related behaviors in restaurants and could be used to create tailored training programs to improve employees’ food safety practices and increase food code compliance. 5.2. Limitations of the study and recommendations for future study This study used self-report data and did not control for respondents’ affects, emotions or evaluative perceptions. Thus, there may be the possibility that mono-source bias may inflate or distort the parameters of interest. Therefore, the study suggests the need to rely on alternate data sources. In addition, social desirability bias (the participant's tendency toward a perception of what is “correct” or socially acceptable) may affect variable means and cause misleading results (De Jong et al., 2010). For instance, the statement, “I intend to follow food safety practices during working hours,” is considered socially desirable as everyone should follow food safety practices. However, in reality, some employees may not follow and may not intend to follow these, even though they are likely to respond favorably to this statement regardless of their intentions because of the social desirability bias. Due to the low response rate of this study (34.3%), the demographic profile of the respondents was compared to the labor force and employment data in the foodservice industry from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS], 2008). The age group for employees younger than 20 years old in this study (1.8%) was less than that of the data (19.9%) from the BLS (2008). One possible reason for this finding may be that participants in this study were required to be 18 years of age or older because of the mandates of the Institutional Review Board. In addition, the majority of the respondents (80.4%) in this study were between 20 and 29 years of age, while the data from the BLS showed that 45.9% of employees are between 20 and 34 years of age. The distribution of foodservice employment in this study is somewhat different from that of the BLS data. Furthermore, approximately 73% of the respondents in this study were white, which is not reflective of frontline employees in restaurants nationally. Therefore, the results of this study may not represent the general foodservice labor force in the U.S. In addition, this study did not consider the impact of respondents’ ethnicity and cultural norms or the impact of the ownership of the restaurant (chain vs. independent) on the relationships among TL, OC, and employees’ attitudes and intentions to follow food safety practices in restaurants. For future study, determining the impacts of ethnicity, cultural norms, and restaurant ownership will be recommended because there may be differences among ethnicity and/or organizational structure and vision with respect to policies and procedures (anonymous reviewer). Additionally, the length of time spent with an operation and with the managers may also be another area of future research. The results of this study showed the apparent lack of a relationship between TL and employees’ attitudes and intentions to follow food safety practices. A possible reason for this may be that employees do not have feelings of connections with their managers as compared to the connections that they feel with their coworkers. Therefore, it is possible that managers and employees are not aware of the other's viewpoints. It may also be that managers, in turn, may not effectively motivate and inspire their employees to follow food safety practices. Therefore, if frontline employees spend more time with managers, the impact of TL on employees’ attitudes and intentions to follow food safety practices may be stronger. The effect of TL and OC on the employees’ attitudes and intentions may need to be observed over a longer period of time, as in a longitudinal study, because issues of time and timing are absolutely central to modern management and organizational behavioral research (Cooper et al., 2001). However, because high turnover rates are common in the restaurant industry, it is unfortunately very likely that follow-up rates in a longitudinal study would be low. Regarding the survey distribution, the managers agreed to follow the researcher's instructions, and there was no indication that they did otherwise. However, it is possible that a manager deviated from the directions. Based on the nature of the labor market in the restaurant industry, frontline employees are young, have a relatively low-level of education, and are part-time or seasonal employees receiving a federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2010). Frontline employees’ attitudes and intentions to work in an industry that is less well compensated may be also influenced by increased monetary or tangible rewards than by the attributes of TL. Therefore, the authors suggest, as an area of future study, measuring frontline employees’ tips and compensations and compare the impact of transactional leadership style with TL on frontline employees’ attitudes and intentions to follow food safety practices. Following food safety practices and food code compliance is also related to moral obligation. However, even employees who are well aware of the food safety ‘rules’ may ignore them if there are no supervisors or managers in the workplace or if employees do not choose to pay attention to them. In addition, they consider that violations of food safety practices are not that serious or harmful. Therefore, an individual's sense of moral obligation could be another possible moderating variable. Accordingly, future research should consider the influence of employees’ moral obligation on workplace food safety practices. Additionally, while due diligence was exercised to reduce the number of question in the TL and OC constructs, it is possible that some of the respondents may have viewed the questions as loaded questions. However, based on the results of the group of experts, this should not have adversely affected the results as both parts of the questions were very highly correlated within their constructs. Finally, the actual performance, which is beyond the scope of this study, may be of importance in the area of food safety. Future studies should consider the impact of comprehensive antecedents of attitudes and intentions on the actual food safety practices.