Job Meaningfulness as an Important Motivator during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Under the ongoing and unprecedented uncertainties of COVID-19 (i.e., C19), people constantly seek and appraise relevant information to make sense of the situation. Yet, little is known about how people connect the external situation to their feelings and behaviors, and reconcile the meaning of their work roles with the larger pandemic context. This gap in knowledge is aggravated by the fact that many past studies on large-scale crises or tragedies focused on between-person employee reactions after a singular incident, which would not apply to the current enduring pandemic. Our research addresses this by examining the within-person daily relations of an employee’s C19 situational appraisals with their job performance. Based on Lazarus’ (1991) cognitive-motivational-relational theory, we predict that unfavorable previous-day C19 situational appraisal will be more strongly related to current-day negative affective state for employees whose C19-induced workload is higher (vs. lower), because fluctuations in the pandemic situation would have greater personal relevance for them. We also contend that higher (vs. lower) perceived job meaningfulness in combating C19 can mitigate the negative relation of negative affective state on job performance, because it offers employees a sense of social duty and obligation to maintain their performance despite their negative emotions. The results from 848 daily responses from 118 full-time employees collected during the pandemic support our hypotheses, and we discuss the implications of these findings for the present and the future beyond the C19 pandemic.