Abstract
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has reduced the sense of security of people in everyday life. The efforts of managers in the workplace to minimize the health risks and economic damage, however, can provide the employees with a greater sense of security. The aim of this study was to identify the types of workplace responses to the pandemic outbreak with respect to the characteristics of employees and their employers accomplishing the differences in subjective sense of workplace security before the pandemic and during the outbreak. Three hundred and thirty-seven Polish employees completed an online survey during the first 2 weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Using the cluster analysis, we identified four subgroups of employees differing in their sense of workplace security, work-related psychological factors, and perceived management styles of their supervisors. Employees led by developers and executive managers sustained a high sense of work security and positive attitude to work, while those led by compromisers and deserter managers suffered from the highest drop of subjective security. In this study, we proposed how employees can be protected from overreactions and unnecessary panic in a time of global crisis by virtue of the psychological competences of their supervisors and employers.
Highlights
The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by the new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is potentially the greatest threat to global health and security since World War II
Research reports a significant increase in stress, depression, and anxiety in many countries, including China (Wang et al, 2020), Italy (Amerio et al, 2020), Spain (Ozamiz-Etxebarria et al, 2020), Germany (Bauerle et al, 2020), France (Husky et al, 2020), the United Kingdom (Smith et al, 2020) and the variety of other populations observed during COVID-19 and previous epidemics (Torales et al, 2020)
We focused on the classic three-dimensional (3D) management style theory that can be helpful in planning a management strategy for a variety of employees (Reddin, 1990; see Reddin, 1967)
Summary
The ongoing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by the new severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is potentially the greatest threat to global health and security since World War II. An emotional dysregulation increasing the psychological distress was observed in the general population (Moccia et al, 2020; Janiri et al, 2021) and in clinical samples of people with affective (Di Nicola et al, 2020) and neurological disorders (Taquet et al, 2021) It seems that people with poorer general health, women, students, young employees, individuals aged older than 50 years, and medical staff might be sensitive to the psychological difficulties of the crisis (Tian et al, 2020; Wang et al, 2020). A suffering of healthcare workers has been already observed in China (Pappa et al, 2020), India (Chew et al, 2020), the United States (Shechter et al, 2020), Spain (García-Fernández et al, 2007), and other countries
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