Abstract
Employee safety behavior is critical for occupational health in work environments threatened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, the widespread and increasingly serious job burnout of employees is a complex and difficult problem for enterprises to handle during any epidemic. Therefore, it is helpful to identify and discuss job burnout and other main psychological factors that affect safety behavior to find appropriate solutions. Using the PLS-SEM method, the study explored the relationship between job burnout and safety behavior against the epidemic, as well as the mediating role of psychological contract. According to the local guidelines for controlling COVID-19, this study revised the safety behavior scale. Data were collected by structured questionnaires in May to July 2020 from Chinese employees (N = 353) who resumed their work after the outbreak of the pandemic. The findings confirmed that job burnout has a negative impact on safety behavior, and psychological contract play a partial mediating role in mitigating the negative impact. Specifically, the transaction dimension and relationship dimension of psychological contract negatively affected safety behavior while the development dimension of the psychological contract was not directly related to safety behavior. It is suggested that enterprises should take effective measures to reduce employees’ job burnout and implement flexible psychological contract management and intervention, so as to effectively improve the performance of work safety behavior. Based on the multidimensional model, the findings of this study shed light on promoting safety behavior to prevent the spread of epidemics.
Highlights
With the worldwide spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the dramatic economic policy response, the issues of restarting production have been rapidly brought to the fore
Because the purpose of this study is to explore the predictive ability of job burnout for prevention behavior through psychological contract and to provide theoretical guidance for the prevention of COVID-19, this study conducts exploratory research rather than pursuing the best model parameter estimation results
We must admit that widespread and increasingly serious job burnout is a complex and difficult problem for enterprises to address during any epidemic
Summary
With the worldwide spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and the dramatic economic policy response, the issues of restarting production have been rapidly brought to the fore. Many countries have stressed the need to restart much-needed business activities in response to the economic downturn brought about by the pandemic as the global economy seeks to develop smoothly and. This will undoubtedly lead to a large number of employees facing a high-risk and high mental stress (Rodríguez-Rey et al, 2020). Because job burnout will affect the mental health and work behavior of employees, this has raised concerns for the possible aggravation of job burnout, and for safety behavior performance during epidemics (Du and Liu, 2020; Gómez-Salgado et al, 2020). With the gradual resumption of work and production, the rate of returning to work in large and medium-sized enterprises has reached 94%, close to the normal level in previous years
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
