Food supply chain is characterized by the complexity of covering a large range of aspects, which determines the difficulty of its safety risk prevention and control. Every step in food supply chain involves human activities, therefore the human participation becomes one of the critical elements that impact the food supply chain safety risk. From the perspective of human behavior as a cut-in point, the matter of food supply chain safety risk prevention and control is discussed and analyzed, referring to related theories of organizational behavior. Based on the discussion on attitude and motivation, two main factors that influence human behavior, approaches of controlling human behavior are summarized from two aspects, which are respectively correcting the food supply chain participants’ attitudes and providing them with incentives, so as to reach the goal of food supply chain safety risk prevention and control.
Food supply chain is characterized with its complexity, which is one of the most important reasons for what makes the matter of food safety complicated. There are a great deal of links in food supply chain, interconnected with each other, and as long as one of them is out of work, the problems of food safety will be aroused, even putting threats to human welfare. Therefore, food supply chain safety is critical to guarantee safe and efficient food supply. Unsafe elements of food supply exist in various places in food supply chain. They can be found in supplying link, in processing link, in transporting link, or in consuming link and the like [
Food supply chain is an integrated system that guarantees a series of links organically and economically operate, ranging from raw material, producing and processing, restoring to sales and consuming. Every link in food supply chain involves human resources, so the researches on human behavior in supply chain refer to all links. As for researches in supply link of food supply chain, R. C. Cui et al. (2012) [
Concluded from above discussion, although human behavior has been referred in researches on food supply chain safety risk, the mechanism of behavior shaping has not been discussed yet. Taken influencing factors of behavior shaping as a cut-in point, with connecting human behavior and food supply chain safety risk, and through discussing the mechanism of behavior shaping, the behavior triggering food supply chain safety risk is analyzed essentially. The food supply chain safety risk prevention and control is discussed from the perspective of behavior control.
To a large extent, the food supply chain safety risk attributes to human factors. Human, as the important participant in the food chain, is responsible for the safety problems that occur in it. Human participates in all kinds of activities and is responsible for all the production. Even though the human workers are replaced by machines, the projects that they operate are made by human. Therefore, most of the safety problems should be attributed to human factors. Due to the subjective initiative and limited rationality [
Behavior, as a psychological term, contains four aspects, which are respectively values, attitudes, perception and learning [
Attitudes influence the direction of behaviors but it is not the only influence. The practice of a behavior needs incentives. Incentive process is a psychological activity that intrinsic motivations which makes people strive to their goal. The incentive process is started in an external stimulus which emerges from the incompatibility of individual and the surrounding environment caused by some kind of imbalance or insecurity, then the emotion begins to get nervous, and this tension is a performance of need. The need is another influence of attitude. When the external incentives can meet the needs, then the motive will occur and behavior will follow. When the behavior meets the need, then tension will be weakened. Thus the whole process of incentive will be complete. See as figure 2.
This shows that human behavior plays a very important role in food chain safety control and an entry point. Those behaviors that cause risks are considered as “unsafe behaviors”. To avoid unsafe behaviors, the attitudeforming factors and incentive factors should be changed to control the direction of attitude and the intensity of incentive, so that the behaviors of food chain participants
will develop toward the expected direction and then reach the goal of risk control.
The food supply chain safety risks exist in all aspects of the food chain. Although these risks occur in different links, what they have in common is that people’s participation. In other words, a large part of the food supply chain safety risks can be attributed to human behavior. Therefore, there is a great point in controlling participants’ behavior when preventing and controlling the food supply chain safety risk. Individual behavior is mainly affected by two factors, which are attitude and the motivation. The attitude of individual decides the direction of behavior, while external motivation affects performance of the individual behavior. Hence the prevention and control of food chain safety risk based on behavior should focus on these two aspects.
Attitude is a tendency of acts. Correcting attitude plays a key role in human behavior. Wrong attitude will lead to unsafe behavior. Hence, participants’ attitude should be
corrected at first in order to avoid unsafe behavior in food supply chain. When correcting their attitude, it’s necessary to understand and control the factors that affect the formation of attitude. When those factors are under control, attitude can be corrected fundamentally, guiding to correct behavior. The main factors are need, knowledge, group perception, personality traits and individual experience.
Individual needs, personality traits, and personal experience is highly subjective and personalized, belonging to internal traits, while knowledge and group perception is more objective and interlinked, belonging to external environment. Accordingly, the latter two factors that influence the formation of attitude are easier to be controlled for their objectivity, which is of help to food supply chain safety risk prevention and control. In addition, personal trait and subjective characteristics can be changed correspondingly through external environment impact like education, training or group perception. According to Lewin field theory, human behavior is a function of external environment and personality, which indicates that external environment is one of critical elements that impact human behavior. Therefore, knowledge and external environment are two critical points of correcting food supply chain participants’ attitudes as well as essential factors that influence the formation of attitude.
The information and knowledge individuals obtain in working or studying influence the formation of attitude. They tend to compare the knowledge they recently receive to their existing attitude, and adapt new knowledge into existing attitude or change former cognition system in order to develop new attitude through that comparison. Some food supply chain participants are short of relevant knowledge or perform incorrect operations, which results in safety issues. Take China’s food supply chain for example, food and drink industry in China is one of main employers that attract lots of laid-off workers and rural surplus labor source who are lacking health knowledge and operation skills, which adds underlying safety troubles to this industry. By education and training, publicity of health knowledge or practice of safe operation, employed personnel could get their safety perception improved, attitude corrected, behavior restrained, therefore food safety risks based on behaviors get lowered through restraining behavior. D. R. Johnson (1995) [
As a consequence, in preventing and controlling food supply chain safety risk, food industry associations ought to play an active role in industry related training. For example, in food supplying link, the upstream industry is usually composed of agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry and aquaculture industry, in which the potential safety hazard hidden in breeding and cultivation process is inevitably passed to downstream food supply chain. Consequently, employees in upstream industry should receive regular related education and training in terms of pesticide and agriculture chemicals usage, poultry feed and the like. Through long-term education and training, food suppliers incline to change their knowledge system and develop new attitude by comparing newly received knowledge to the former. Education and training can make the food suppliers develop habitual safe behavior in daily operation, thereby reducing the possibility of food supply chain safety risk caused by unsafe behaviors.
The attitude of individual is usually affected by his surrounding group, such as family, school, community he belongs to and the like. This is because individual’s sense of group identity makes them more likely to accept the norms of group or receive similar education or else. In China, food safety incidents have happened frequently in recent years, which have much to do with the status quo of food processing industry. Food processing Industry consists of a great number of enterprises of small size, lacking of technology and connection between each other. This low diversity of enterprises makes it hard to strengthen industry scale and to form a standardized mechanism, which inevitably misleads some individual organizations to adopt improper behavior, resulting in adding to food supply chain safety risk.
Therefore, integration of food processing industry is a necessary measure to be taken. Government and industry associations should guide to build up industry cluster, which helps facilitate collaboration and encourage learning among enterprises, improving the managerial efficiency and effectiveness within the food industry. Meanwhile, related laws and regulations need to be implemented rigorously. The rigor of laws and regulations can keep in check human behaviors in the food processing. Thus, each enterprise exposes itself to a scaled and standardized management mechanism, influenced by other organizations among the cluster. Through frequent communication and cooperation among enterprises, the perception of safe behavior of each organization gradually converge to form an industry standard, in order to curb unsafe behaviors of individual enterprise.
For food supply chain with a high complexity, motivation is a critical factor to improve the quality of food supply chain operation, so as to lower food supply chain safety risk. S. A. Cohen et al. (2007) [
Correct attitude is not simply enough to develop safe behavior, motivation is another drive. According to motivation theory, positive stimulus which breeds need for safe acts is necessary in preventing unsafe behavior, and so is the inducement that makes the actors feel that safe behavior can satisfy their needs. On the other hand, negative stimulus should be restrained, avoiding behaviors giving rise to problems. Positive stimulus is rewarding those behaviors guaranteeing and improving food safety, therefore these safe behaviors get reinforced and can be adopted repeatedly. On the contrary, negative stimulus is to punish those behaviors triggering food supply chain safety risk, and these unsafe behavior get restrained, so as to lower risk.
Reinforcement is a psychological term, which means the connection between the increase of some stimulus and the organism. Behavior reinforcement is the process of increasing, decreasing or eliminating some behavior through consistently changing of environmental stimulus. Reinforcement can be divided into positive ones and negative ones. Both of them are processes of reinforcing behavior, the difference between them is the way of changing the environmental stimulus. As for positive reinforcement, behavior is reinforced through increasing stimulus followed by the behavior. On the contrary, negative reinforcement is through removing stimulus to strengthen the behavior.
In the process of management, most people use positive reinforcement to encourage the repetition of correct behavior, such as praise, promotion, payment of prizes and grant award. Thus the safe behavior in food supply chain can be increased by positive reinforcements. Heineken used to run a “Forecast accuracy incentive program”, which aimed at encouraging the beer distributors to increase the quality of goods demand prediction. Goods demand prediction is an important way of increase the efficiency of supply chain and a key to decrease the incidence of supply safety risk. By rewarding American express, one of their distributors, gift cards, Heineken increase enthusiasm of the prediction workers substantially, thus the accuracy of monthly prediction from 2004 to 2005 increased 10% [
According to motivation theory, when the external environment stimulates an individual, the needs and motivation formed correspondingly is not enough to develop a behavior. In the process of behavior shaping, an inducement that makes individuals feel that their needs can be satisfied is required. That is to say, only higher incentive availability can make individuals adopted expected behaviors. Take the above discussion on positive reinforcement for an example, the rewards given to raw material supplier need to meet at least two points to be considered high availability: 1) The rewards should be much more lucrative than the profits obtained through adopting unsafe behaviors. If the satisfaction brought by the rewards is not sufficient to replace the profits gained from unsafe behavior, then suppliers will continue to adopt unsafe behavior; 2) The rewards need to be awarded in time. The rewards that are not honored punctually will undermine or even eliminate the effectiveness of motivation, because incentives will not work if there is no connection between safe behavior and reward due to time delay.
The food safety issue has become a hot topic at home and abroad. In recent years, the frequent domestic food safety incidents have made China’s food export industry suffer from a crisis of confidence, especially the “food threat theory” concocted by the developed countries has seriously affected China’s food exports. Food supply chain safety risks arise from the supply chain, the food supply chain safety risk management is one of the internationally recognized concepts of food safety management, and also is the basis of establishing food safety monitor measures [