Having a Conscientious Personality Helps an Organizational Climate

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Having a Conscientious Personality Helps an Organizational Climate…

Chapter 6

Having a Conscientious Personality Helps an Organizational Climate of Food Safety Predict Food Safety Behavior

Gary S. Nickell1 and Verlin B. Hinsz2

1 Minnesota State University Moorhead, USA

2 North Dakota State University, USA

Abstract

Food safety is an essential function of workers involved in food manufacture, preparation, and cooking. Several recent outbreaks of food-related illnesses and deaths have brought heighten attention to the need for a safe food supply. Although there are many individual and situational factors that play a role in food safety, this chapter considers how an organizational climate of food safety and individual differences in trait conscientiousness contribute to food safety behavior. A climate of food safety is a specific aspect of the overall climate of a food-processing organization. A climate of food safety is based on the individual’s perception of the policies, procedures, and practices toward keeping food safe and uncontaminated in an organization. Trait conscientiousness is one of the few personality traits shown to be a consistent predictor of job performance across many occupations. This trait conscientiousness should be vital for food safety behaviors. We show that both a positive organizational climate of food safety and greater trait conscientiousness predicted enhanced self-reported food safety behavior. In addition, a moderation effect was found such that individuals having higher trait conscientiousness reported relatively more frequent food safety behaviors when they perceived a stronger climate of food safety in the organization. This research also shows how notions of organizational safety climate generalize beyond traditional views to include safety of the products made by workers in the organization.

Introduction

As highlighted by several recent incidents, the safety of food products is an important concern for organizations involved in food production. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, in 2008 there were 706,000 workers involved in food processing or manufacturing, 2.9 million cooks, chefs, and food preparation workers, and 7.7 million food and beverage serving workers. Food safety is an essential function of these jobs. Several recent outbreaks of food-related illnesses and deaths have brought heighten attention to the need to keep our food supply safe. The Center for Disease Control estimates that in the U.S. alone, foodborne diseases account for approximately 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5000 death each year (Mead et al., 1999). Although there are many individual and situational factors that play a role in food safety, this chapter considers how an organizational climate of food safety and individual differences in trait conscientiousness contribute to food safety behavior.

There are many approaches to understanding how individuals tend to engage in food safety behaviors. The approach that we follow in the study reported in this chapter is that of the prediction of behavior with individual traits and situational characteristics (Mischel & Shoda, 1995). From this perspective, to understand behavior it is useful to focus on the situational factors that facilitate or impede performance of the specific behavior as well as to consider how the dispositions or traits of the individual also foster or hinder engaging in the behavior. In the context of the behavior of food processing workers, we believe that engaging in food safety behaviors involves a personality trait such as conscientiousness as well as how the climate of the organization helps the employees to hold beliefs about the importance of engaging in food safety behaviors. We provide a broader basis for this conceptualization next.

An Organizational Climate of Food Safety

Organizational climate refers to the common and shared perceptions among employees of an organization regarding the policies, procedures, and practices of that organization (Rentsch, 1990). Organizational climate has been found to influence a variety of behaviors in organizations (Ashkanasy, Wilderom, & Peterson, 2000). Organization climate usually includes employees’ perceptions of numerous aspects of their work environment, including the physical environment, safety, supervision, management, and co-workers. Instead of focusing on an overall measure of organizational climate, organizational researchers frequently study a numbers of specific climates such as the climate of safety (e.g., Zohar, 2003), or the climate of customer service (Burke, Borucki, & Hurley, 1992). These specific climates help in understanding issues and challenges relevant to certain types of industries (e.g., fast food restaurants).

Modeled on the safety climate literature (Zohar, 2003), a climate of food safety is based on the individual’s perception of the policies, procedures, and practices toward keeping food safe and uncontaminated. A climate of food safety is a specific aspect of the overall climate of organizations involved in food processing and manufacturing, food preparation, and food service. A key factor in understanding organizational climate is climate strength. Climate strength has been conceptualized by researchers in two main ways. Some have viewed climate strength as the degree of agreement in individual employee’s perceptions of the organization. This is similar to “crystallization” (Cialdini, Bator, & Guadagno, 1999) which is the near unanimous agreement of the employees' with regard to their organizational perceptions. A second view of climate strength is “intensity” in which there is a strong average approval or disapproval for certain behaviors. In the current study, we adopt this intensity view of climate strength. If a food production organization has a strong climate supporting food safety then workers are more likely to engage in food safety behaviors. Although organizations may promote food safety in formal policies and procedures, workers exposed to weak climates supporting food safety are less likely to comply with food safety regulations. However, even in a weak climate of food safety, certain workers will be diligent in trying to keep the food products safe and clean.

To determine if an organizational climate of food safety influences workers tendencies to engage in food safety behaviors, it is necessary to have a measure of the organizational climate of food safety. Currently there are no published measures of a climate of food safety. However, generalizing from the safety climate literature, there are a number of advantages of using a reliable and valid measure of food safety climate (Seo, Torabi, Blair, & Ellis, 2004). Food safety climate measures can provide data about food safety problems before they develop into an actual food related outbreak (Lutness, 1987). A good measure of the organizational climate of food safety could be used to compare a climate of food safety between different departments and different organizations. In this way, preventative actions can be taken to reduce food safety problems if a diagnosis of where problems might arise in the organization is made. Thus, one of the purposes of this study was to develop a reliable and valid measure of food safety climate that could be used to test hypotheses in this study as well as future studies.

Personality at Work

As indicated above, individual factors have been long recognized as playing an important role in predicting behavior. Rotter, Chance, and Phares (1972) suggests that behavior is a function of the person and the situation. For much research on behavior, person factors have been considered to reflect personality. Although there has historically been waxing and waning in the view of the importance of personality on behavior (Bem & Allen, 1974; Mischel, 1968; Mischel & Shoda, 1995), more recently there has been a resurgence in the perception of personality’s impact on behavior. In particular, a number of meta-analyses have shown that personality variables, if properly specified and assessed, can make important contributions to the prediction of behavior (Barrick, Mount, & Judge, 2001). For our considerations of food processing workers, it is also important to recognize that personality influence behaviors as work.

Recent conceptions of work behavior have had to include personality to reflect a comprehensive view of the factors contributing to behavior at work (Barrick & Ryan, 2003; Roberts & Hogan, 2001). Primarily arising from the emergence of the five factor model of personality (McCrae & Costa, 2003), research has focused on identifying the underlying personality factors that influence work behavior. In particular, research attempts to identify the specific personality factors that influence work behaviors in general as well as work involving specific types of tasks. Meta-analyses and research in this arena have demonstrated that many of the five factors of personality influence work behavior for particular jobs. These five personality factors include: extroversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. A remarkable finding is that emotional stability and conscientiousness are positively related to work behaviors (Barrick, Mount, & Judge, 2001). In the case of food safety, in which detection and prevention is required, conscientiousness is likely to be an important personal factor influencing food safety behaviors.

Conscientiousness as a Spur to Food Safety Behaviors

Trait conscientiousness is one of the few personality traits shown to be a consistent predictor of job performance across many occupations (Barrick & Mount, 1991). Conscientiousness in work behavior relates to such characteristics as reliability, planning, and concentration. Individuals who are conscientious at work are organized, focused, ambitious, methodical, perfectionistic, and driven. For many organizations, these characteristics of workers having the underlying trait of conscientiousness contribute to task accomplishment and organizational effectiveness. Although conscientiousness has been found to relate to teamwork, training performance, and overall work performance (Barrick et al., 2001), little research has focused on the relationship between conscientiousness and safety behavior (Wallace & Chen, 2006). The studies examining this relationship have only found weak to moderate relationships.

However, we expect that conscientiousness may be vital for food safety behaviors.

Food safety can be considered as a set of behaviors that protect the product and its ultimate consumers. Consequently, food safety is related to product security and reflects general behaviors of safety and security (Hinsz & Nickell, 2004). Conscientiousness on the part of food processing workers should enhance food safety, particularly if food safety is seen as a vital component of food production. Conscientiousness should relate to being alert to possible contamination, a focus on the ways contamination could arise, methodical performance of actions that insure clean food, and drive to keep the food clean. Our previous research has shown that attention to potential contamination (Hinsz & Nickell, 2004), following routine food safety behaviors methodically (Hinsz, Nickell, & Park, 2007), and the drive or motivation to keep the food clean (Hinsz & Nickell, 2004) were found to relate to food safety related behaviors. Consequently, we expect that conscientiousness should predict reports of food safety behaviors.

The Joint Influences of Conscientiousness and a Climate of Food Safety

We propose that person variables such as conscientiousness and situational characteristics such as an organizational climate for food safety can contribute to the prediction of food safety behaviors in food production. Additionally, the person by situation perspective implies that the person variable and the situational characteristic could combine to jointly influence behavior. In particular, we recognize that an organizational climate of food safety has the potential to affect all workers who would be receptive to those climate influences. Specific individuals may be more receptive than others. In particular, individuals who come to the situation already predisposed toward engaging in food safety behaviors could find the organizational climate supportive of their own predilections. These individuals who are highly predisposed toward food safety would then have an increased tendency to perform food safety behaviors in conditions in which the situation is supportive. For our study, this leads to our hypothesis of a moderating influence of conscientiousness on climate of safety for food safety behaviors such that more conscientious individuals will respond with more food safety behaviors when they perceive stronger climates of food safety. This moderating pattern is predicted in addition to our hypothesis that both an organizational climate of food safety and conscientiousness predict self-reported food safety behavior. In this fashion, we predict that food safety behavior can be predicted by both person and situational factors as well as unique combinations of these two factors.

Method

Participants

Employees (n = 260) at a fully-integrated turkey processing plant located in a small upper Midwestern community were given the opportunity to participant in the study by completing a survey designed by the researchers. Two hundred nine workers (86% of the workforce) took this questionnaire which was made available to them by the plant’s human resource department. Of these employees, 180 of the workers (84%) completed this survey at home, returned it to the researchers several days later, and were paid $15 for completing it.

The average age of respondents was 41 years (range = 17 – 85 years), and the average length of employment at the plant was 8.34 years (range = .02 – 30 years). The gender of the respondents (37% women) was fairly representative of the plant’s workers (31%), Fisher’s exact p = .21.

Questionnaire

The questionnaire began with a two-page introduction that provided information on the purpose of the survey, the measures taken by the researchers to ensure confidentiality of responses, the monetary compensation being offered, and detailed definitions of the phrases that would be used throughout the survey (i.e., “clean and uncontaminated turkey products” and “doing all that is needed to produce clean and uncontaminated turkey products”). For the composite measures of interest, related items were interspersed within the survey.

General Self-reported Safety Behavior

It was not possible to measure actual worker food safety related behaviors in this plant since employees were engaged in different activities in different departments throughout the plant. In addition, the plant would not allow us to videotape the behaviors of the workers. Therefore, general self-reported behaviors were used as a proxy for actual behavior. The five item self-reported food safety behavior measure involved questions such as ‘How often do you do all that is needed to produce clean and uncontaminated turkey products?’ (1=never to 7=always). These items had very good internal consistency, α=.86, so a composite self-reported behavior measure was constructed as the mean of these five items.

Trait Conscientiousness

The measure of trait conscientiousness was constructed from 19 items related to conscientiousness identified in the International Personality Item Pool (Goldberg, et al., 2006). Sample items include “I like order,” “I dislike imperfect work,” and “I follow a schedule.” The workers responded “to indicate if how accurately this statement describes you” to each of the 19 items on a seven point response scale from 1=inaccurate to 7=accurate. These items had very good internal consistency, α=.93, so a composite conscientiousness measure was constructed from an average of these responses.