Effect of Fear of Pandemic Infection on Employee Psychological Wellbeing:

Abstract

In this paper, we studied the impact of fear of pandemic (COVID-19) on employee psychological wellbeing. We hypothesized that the direct relationship between these two variables was mediated by rumination and moderated by employee job embeddedness and perceived organizational support. To test this moderated-mediation model, we collected the study data from 307 respondents working in Pakistan's banking and healthcare organizations. We used structural equation modelling and Process MACRO for analysis of the data. The study results confirmed that pandemic fear had a significant adverse effect on employees’ psychological well-being. Further, this relationship was mediated by employee rumination and moderated by perceived organizational support, as hypothesized. However, contrary to our initial hypothesis, and previous research findings of a recent study, the conditional indirect effect of the organizational embeddedness positively affected employee psychological wellbeing. The current study significantly contributed to job embeddedness theory which affirms that the job embeddedness provides resources that help improve employee well-being. Finally, the paper presents the practical implications, limitation and future research directions.