Authentic leadership and employee resilience during the COVID-19: The role of flow, organizational identification, and trust.

The present work investigated fundamental mediating mechanisms (i.e., flow experience, organizational identification, and trust), underlining the impact of authentic leadership on employee resilience during the turbulent COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 901 frontline employees working in a construction engineering company in China participated in this study. They were asked to respond to a battery of questionnaires comprising Trust Scale (affective-based, cognitive-based, and competence-based), Flow Proneness Questionnaire (FPQ), Organizational Identification Scale, Authentic Leadership Questionnaire, and Employee Resilience Scale. Results of structural equation modeling indicated that: (1) Authentic leadership positively predicted employee resilience in the COVID-19 pandemic, directly and indirectly. (2) As for the indirect relationship, two parallel mediation effects and one chain mediation were detected: employees' flow at work and organizational identification respectively and dependently mediated the relationship between authentic leadership and employee resilience; trust and organizational identification played as a chain mediation role within authentic leadership-employee resilience association. The study provides empirical evidence for organizations' resilience-building and leadership training programs. Findings also contribute to the literature by facilitating flow intervention, promoting organizational identification and trust to enhance the effect of authentic leadership in promoting positive psychological functioning of employee resilience. Limitations with respect to future research directions were also outlined.

Flow as a Key Predictor of Subjective Well-Being Among Chinese University Students: A Chain Mediating Model.

The present study investigated a conceptual model by testing flow experience and subjective well-being of university students during Coronavirus Diseas-19 (COVID-19) via considering their underlying mechanisms of academic self-efficacy and self-esteem. A total of 1,109 Chinese university students completed a questionnaire containing scales of subjective well-being, flow, academic self-efficacy, and self-esteem. Results yielded from the structural equation modeling analysis indicated a significant and positive association between flow experience and subjective well-being, and such an association was sequentially mediated by academic self-efficacy and self-esteem. Findings also provided empirical evidence for the proposed model highlighting the significant role of flow experience at the higher educational context in predicting subjective well-being of Chinese university students, and how such a relation can be supported by suggested mediating roles academic self-efficacy and self-esteem played.

Authoritarian responsiveness and political attitudes during COVID-19: evidence from Weibo and a survey experiment

How do citizens react to authoritarian responsiveness? To investigate this question, we study how Chinese citizens reacted to a novel government initiative which enabled social media users to publicly post requests for COVID-related medical assistance. To understand the effect of this initiative on public perceptions of government effectiveness, we employ a two-part empirical strategy. First, we conduct a survey experiment in which we directly expose subjects to real help-seeking posts, in which we find that viewing posts did not improve subjects’ ratings of government effectiveness, and in some cases worsened them. Second, we analyze over 10,000 real-world Weibo posts to understand the political orientation of the discourse around help-seekers. We find that negative and politically critical posts far outweighed positive and laudatory posts, complementing our survey experiment results. To contextualize our results, we develop a theoretic framework to understand the effects of different types of responsiveness on citizens’ political attitudes. We suggest that citizens’ negative reactions in this case were primarily influenced by public demands for help, which illuminated existing problems and failures of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Chinese Sociological Review is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)