RAPID: The Roles of Organizational Contextual Factors in Worker Reactions to COVID-19

Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences - The outbreak of COVID-19 has caused great concerns worldwide. COVID-19 directly affects the physical, financial, and psychological well-being of those who live in close proximity to the outbreak areas. Because of its potential threat to physical health, it has widespread effects on the thought processes and behaviors of the global population. This project seeks to understand the impact of COVID-19 by examining how it affects workers? perceptions of the health-related threat, their emotional and motivational reactions towards the threat, and their downstream work-related behaviors. This project will analyze workers? anxiety and desire to make a lasting and meaningful impact to their environment as different reactions towards COVID-19. These reactions, in turn, can lead to different levels of work performance, helping behaviors, and withdrawal from the workplace. Importantly, the project will test if and how the organizational context may play an important role in encouraging effective versus dysfunctional coping among workers when facing threats related to COVID-19. Results from the project will enhance understanding of how workers react to health-related threat information, and how their productivity and well-being may be affected by the information. Results will also equip organizations with knowledge to create a context that will help employees adapt to the threat brought on by COVID-19 or other similar life-threatening crises. More broadly, this project will clarify how organizations and managers can transform negative crises and challenges into opportunities to boost workforce morale and prosocial motivation.

The goal of the proposed research is to understand the impact of COVID-19 among working adults within the context of the pandemic. The project conceptualizes COVID-19 as a salient mortality cue and will analyze individual employees? adaptive reflection and maladaptive anxiety as responses to this cue. The project will also analyze how reflection may be related to employees? positive coping behaviors such as productivity and helping, whereas anxiety as a maladaptive reaction may be associated with negative behaviors such as withdrawal. Finally, the project will examine the organizational contextual factors that may exacerbate or ameliorate workers? reactions towards the threat of COVID-19. The project will consider organizational health climate, ethical leadership, and corporate social responsibility practices as critical factors that may promote the adaptive reactions towards COVID-19. The project will use time-lagged, three-wave surveys to collect data from working adults; structural equation modeling and conditional indirect effect tests will be employed to evaluate research questions. Findings from the project will inform organizational theories related to those involving terror management and generativity.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.