Abstract
OrientationThe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has taken the world by storm. Little is known about leadership, motivation and employee performance during pandemics and associated lockdowns.Research purposeThe current study investigated a model of leadership behaviour, team effectiveness, technological flexibility, work engagement and performance in the context of a ‘hard lockdown’ in South Africa.Motivation for the studyAs a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdown, it was considered from an academic-practitioner perspective to explore leadership behaviour, team effectiveness, technological flexibility, work engagement and performance.Research approach/design and methodSpecifically, remote workers were sampled online via social media (n = 229). Structural equation modelling methods were used to analyse the data, also controlling optimism and pessimism at the item level.Main findingsThe results showed that the resources of leadership behaviour and team effectiveness had direct positive paths to work engagement and that work engagement had a positive path to two performance factors: adaptivity and proactivity. Furthermore, there were significant indirect relationship present from leadership behaviour and team effectiveness to both adaptability and proactivity through work engagement.Practical/managerial implicationsFrom the evidence it seems appropriate to recommend that organisations explore fostering the employee job resources in order to positively impact work engagement, which in turn can have beneficial performance outcomes for organisations who have employees working remotely whilst the COVID-19 regulations remain in force.Contribution/value-addThis study was unique as it sampled from employees ‘locked down’ during a pandemic and gauged their perceptions of leadership behaviour, team effectiveness, technological flexibility, work engagement and performance.
Highlights
There is no doubt that coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and the associated lockdown strategies instituted by most governments, have been the most significant events of the 21st century
The South African government declared a national state of disaster in accordance with law (Disaster Management Act, 2002) and has taken a ‘hard lockdown’ strategy, which indicates a very restrictive set of regulations and arguably one of the most restrictive sets of lockdown regulations in the world when compared to Australia and the United Kingdom (Writer, 2020)
Standard fit measures were considered for the models: comparative fit index (CFI), Tucker–Lewis index (TLI), root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) and the standardised root mean square residual (SRMR)
Summary
Working from home away from their usual office habitat. we have little knowledge of how the current situation impacts employee performance and the mechanisms through which performance is impacted. Employees in other sectors could work from home and many ongoing innovations have been implemented in order to make this possible This situation poses a challenge to leadership, and little research exists that support the effect of leadership on work engagement and performance on remote workers during a lockdown scenario. We did so by focusing on specific resources that may be important to employees at home, given the circumstances of the lockdown, and that play a motivational role in enhancing performance. The resources used in this study as determinants of work engagement and performance are leadership behaviour (as a supervisory support resource), team effectiveness (as a social/collegial support resource) and technology and flexibility (as an organisational support resource). Research has shown work engagement to be an important mediating variable in this regard (cf. Bakker & Demerouti, 2017; De Beer et al, 2012)
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