COVID-19 and Food Delivery Employees’ Workplace Safety

With the global pandemic of COVID-19 in recent years, food delivery employees’ workplace safety has been severely threatened and challenged. Thus, this study hopes to understand their real work safety and its impact. Based on the perspective of human resource development, broaden-and-build theory, and internal and external marketing activities, the study examines the relationships between safety leadership, safety training, employee well-being, service quality, and customer citizenship behavior. The results using three-wave and 498 valid employee-customer pairs (498 food delivery employees and 600 customers) from 2 food delivery companies in Taiwan showed that: (1) Safety leadership positively affects employee well-being; (2) Safety training positively affects employee well-being; (3) Employee well-being positively affects service quality; (4) Employee well-being positively affects customer citizenship behavior; (5) Employee well-being mediates the relationship between safety leadership and customer citizenship behavior, and (6) Safety training moderates the relationship between safety leadership and employee wellbeing. Research and managerial implications are discussed.