Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed many aspects of our society and work life. This study assesses how daily variations in employees' work engagement are affected by daily variations in infection rates in employees' communities. Applying the conceptual framework of event system theory, we argue that surging COVID-19 cases have an impact on employee engagement, depending on the individual sensemaking processes of the pandemic. We assume that employee age and received leader support are key context factors for these sensemaking processes and that particularly older employees and employees who receive little leader consideration react with lower work engagement levels toward rising local COVID-19 infections in their proximity. We find support for most of our proposed relationships in an 8-day diary study of German employees, which we integrate with official COVID-19 case statistics on the county level. We discuss the implications of these results for the literature on extreme events and individual workplace behavior. Furthermore, these findings have important implications for companies and executives who are confronted with local COVID-19 outbreaks or other extreme societal events.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned life upside down
We argue that daily leader consideration behavior is effective in mitigating an adverse effect of the daily number of local COVID-19 cases on daily work engagement leading to the following prediction: Hypothesis 2: There is a two-way interaction between the daily number of local COVID-19 cases and leader consideration on employees’ work engagement such that local COVID-19 cases negatively relate to employees’ daily work engagement for employees with low leader consideration, but the relationship becomes less negative as leader consideration increases
As presented in Model 1 in Table 2, we found no significant effect of daily COVID-19 cases on daily engagement (Coef. = −0.102; p = 0.502)
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has turned life upside down. The rapid worldwide spread of COVID-19 caught organizations and communities off-guard. The scale of the pandemic is reflected in the exponential increase in new cases every day, requiring organizations and communities to continuously adjust work and life routines. The COVID-19 pandemic can be described as an extreme, disrupted context. Such environments are “triggered by extreme events that occur outside the core activities of organizations or communities” We consider the daylevel fluctuation of COVID-19 cases as extreme daily events since this disease results in unbearable physical, psychological, and material consequences to organizational members
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
