Keeping Employees Safe During Health Crises: The Effects of Media Exposure, HR Practices, and Age.

Occupational health and safety are critical in promoting the wellness of organizations and employees. The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most life-threatening viruses encountered in recent history, providing a unique opportunity for research to examine factors that drive employee safety behavior. Drawing from terror management theory, we propose and test a moderated mediation model using data collected from employees working during a peak of the pandemic. We identify two sources of influence - one external (i.e., media exposure), and one internal (i.e., HR practices) to the organization - that shape employees' mortality salience and safety behaviors. We find that COVID-19 HR practices significantly moderate the relationship between daily COVID-19 media exposure and mortality salience, with media exposure positively associated with mortality salience at lower levels of HR practices but its effects substituted by higher levels of HR practices. Moreover, our results also show that mortality salience spurs safety behaviors, with age moderating this relationship such that younger - but not older - employees are more likely to engage in safety behaviors due to mortality salience. Taken together, we offer theoretical implications for the safety behavior literature and practical implications for organizations faced with health crises or having employees who commonly work in hazardous conditions.

When CEOs Are All About Themselves: Perceived CEO Narcissism and Middle Managers' Workplace Behaviors Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

The coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has significantly impacted how businesses operate, creating high levels of uncertainty for organizational members. Drawing on social information processing and implicit leadership theories, we developed and tested a model that explains how middle managers' perceptions of CEO narcissism shape their perceived uncertainty in the workplace, particularly when COVID-19 threatens a firm's survival and growth. Managers' sense of uncertainty leads to their engagement in uncertainty-based coping responses, including laissez-faire leadership (i.e., escape coping) and impression management (i.e., control coping). We collected data from 200 middle managers (Study 1;field survey) and 318 working adults (Study 2;online experiment) in North America and the U.K. and found general support for our model. Our research bridges the gap between micro and macro perspectives and provides novel insights into how perceived CEO narcissism can shape managers' behaviors in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, thereby contributing to the literatures on CEO narcissism, leadership, and crisis management.

How critical activities within COVID-19 intensive care units increase nurses' daily occupational calling.

During normal and predictable circumstances, employees' occupational calling (i.e., a transcendent passion to use their talent and competencies toward positive societal impact and a sense of meaningfulness derived from working in a chosen occupational domain) is observed to be relatively stable. However, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, circumstances have become anything but normal and predictable, thus putting employees' sense of occupational calling to the test. In this study, we investigate the possibility that occupational calling fluctuates across days during situations of crisis, and we identify antecedents and consequence of such fluctuations. To test our model, we conducted a daily diary study of 66 nurses working in intensive care units over 5 consecutive work days in a specialized Wuhan hospital that only admitted confirmed COVID-19 patients during the peak of the pandemic in China. We found that the daily number of code blue events (i.e., cardiopulmonary resuscitation efforts with the primary goal of patient revival) was positively related to daily occupational calling for nurses. Moreover, individual differences in prosocial motivation predicted the average level and variability of occupational calling over the 5 days, which subsequently related to the nurses' job performance. Our study sheds light on how occupational calling enables people with the needed occupational knowledge and skills to function effectively in crisis situations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).