How and why COVID-19-associated uncertainty affects employee work outcomes?

Professor Cynthia Lee, Northeastern University discusses a study that develops and tests a model of how and why COVID-19-associated uncertainty affects employee work outcomes.

Location: ZOOM meeting (please email researchtraining@leeds.ac.uk for the link)

About the speaker:

Cynthia Lee is a distinguished management and organisational development professor at Northeastern University. Lee's research interests include leading change and innovation, performance management, and understanding the changing nature of employment relationships including psychological contracts and of job insecurity. Lee has published more than 200 academic articles in leading journals including the Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Organization Science, and Human Resource Management. Lee serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Applied Psychology and the Journal of Organizational Behavior, where she also works as a special issue co-editor.

Abstract: 

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic continues to create tremendous uncertainty in workplaces. Building on a social identity perspective, this study develops and tests a model of how and why COVID-19-associated uncertainty affects employee work outcomes. The model differentiates uncertainty as either internal (job insecurity) or external (perceived environmental uncertainty) to the organization and reveals their different effects on employee organizational identification, which positively affects employee work outcomes (work effort, organizational citizenship behaviour, and performance).

With a latent change score to model intraindividual changes, we found that increases (or decreases) in job insecurity before versus during the pandemic related to subsequent reductions (or increases) in organizational identification, whereas increases (or decreases) in perceived environmental uncertainty before versus during the pandemic related to subsequent increases (or decreases) in organizational identification; increases (or decreases) in organizational identification then related to increases (or decreases) in positive work outcomes.

These findings complement existing theoretical views that uncertainty typically leads to poor performance by inducing anxiety, and that organizational identification suffers during a crisis such as COVID-19. In turn, this research offers practical implications to help organizations avoid discouraging and even encourage greater organisational identification and performance during crises.

Please contact Dr Chiahuei Wu if you have any questions.