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 behavior, 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 decreases (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.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 693-706 |
Number of pages | 14 |
Journal | Journal of Applied Psychology |
Volume | 107 |
Issue number | 5 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2022. American Psychological Association
Keywords
- Job insecurity
- Organizational citizenship behavior (ocb)
- Organizational identification
- Perceived environmental uncertainty
- Performance
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Applied Psychology