Organizational Climate for Promotion of Safe Food Handling Practices: Development and Validation of Measures in Foodservice Organization

Abstract

To date, little information is available regarding the role of organizational climate on workers’ safe food handling practices in the foodservice sector. Even less is known about research attempting to establish the measures of organizational climate for safe food handling practices. The proposed study aims to develop organizational climate measures for safe food handling practices and to assess reliability and validity of these measures. Organizational climate measures will be developed based upon an analysis of existing safety climate surveys, expert reviews, and pilot testing. The revised measures will be incorporated into a survey and tested using a sample of employees from both commercial and noncommercial foodservice organizations located in the state of Iowa. Cluster sampling technique will be employed for selecting the sample. The measures developed from this study may be used in future research to better understand the impact of climate for safe food handling on organization food safety outcomes.