The Role of Supervisors in the Hygiene Practice Compliance of the Food Sector Workers

¹ Department of Management, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Yalova University, Yalova, Turkey
² Alanya Alaaddin Keykubat University, Food Engineering Department, 07425, Antalya, Turkey

^* Corresponding author: tugba.aktar@alanya.edu.tr

Abstract

Food hygiene is indisputably one of the most important issues in terms of public health and safety. Food workers are the leading staff members for the compliance of the basic hygiene rules. COVID-19 pandemic has attracted more attention especially for the exported goods from the higher case countries. Even though there is no evidence about the food contamination and COVID-19 risk, according to the European Food Safety Authority, food hygiene practices are important to avoid any contamination risks. Managers are known to have a significant influence on the behavior of their subordinates. In the relevant literature, it is stated that “interactional justice”, which is called the behavior of managers concerning their subordinates and providing adequate information and explanation about the decisions taken, is the most important indicator of the performance and efficiency of subordinates. From this point on, it is thought that interactional justice will affect the behavior of food workers to comply with the hygiene rules. In this research, employees' perceptions of interactional justice are planned to be measured using the informational and interpersonal justice subscales of the organizational justice scale. The tendencies to comply with the hygiene rules will be measured by asking the requirements of the HACCP food security system. At the end of this study, we expect to reach the processing operation involved workers of the investigated food companies.