Fostering Food Safety Culture in Restaurants in the United Arab Emirates (UAE): Leadership Impact on Food Handlers’ Commitment and Compliance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
• Food handlers’ commitment is associated with hygiene practices. • Transactional leadership is associated with commitment and hygiene practices. • Transformational leadership is associated with commitment and hygiene practice. • Commitment acts as a mediator between both leadership styles and hygiene practices. • There is no optimum leadership style; favor situational approach. The frequency of foodborne illnesses remains high in most countries and is influenced, among other factors, by the hygienic practices of food handlers. It is now widely recognized that food handlers’ behaviors are often determined by the food safety culture of the businesses in which they work. Proposed models of food safety culture consistently identify food safety leadership as a factor integral to success. Leadership styles vary and can influence the level of commitment to food safety shown by both the business and its employees and particularly by food handlers. To improve food safety performance, this study was designed to: (i) evaluate the level of commitment among food handlers within restaurant environments in Dubai/United Arab Emirates (UAE) and (ii) to investigate the impact of two leadership styles on the food handlers’ commitment to food hygiene behavior using structural equation modeling (SEM). A cross-sectional study was undertaken using a validated questionnaire to collect data from 712 food handlers in 70 restaurants, which was analyzed. Food handlers expressed a high commitment to food safety (75.3%), and a desire to implement good hygiene behaviors (80.8%). After applying SEM and factor analyses, food handlers’ responses showed that they had a very positive perception of transformational leadership styles (80.3%) and to a slightly lesser extent transactional style (70%). These perceptions of leadership behaviors positively influenced their commitment to food safety and acceptable hygiene practices ( p < 0.05). These findings will assist food services management in developing a leadership style capable of generating a positive food safety culture firmly based on employee commitment to continuously improve food hygiene behaviors and compliance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".