Antecedents and outcomes of restaurant employees’ food safety intervention behaviors

Abstract

Restaurants are likely culprits of having foodborne illness outbreaks, causes of which are often linked to employees failing to control food threats during the flow of food. Research indicates that many food risks posed by restaurants could be thwarted if employees would intervene as threats are noticed. For unknown reasons, employees are not always motivated to reduced or eliminate threats when observing poor food safety behaviors, regardless of position, education, or experience in the industry. This study applies the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion (ELM) and protection motivation (PMT) theories to investigate employee reactions to food safety threats. Of keen interest was to identify employees of differing positions in the restaurant and to study how they react to food safety threats to either intervene, passively dismiss, or simply leave the location of the incident.