The COVID-19 pandemic and new hire engagement: Relationships with unemployment rates, state restrictions, and organizational tenure.

The purpose of this article is to simultaneously advance theory and practice by understanding how the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic relates to new hire engagement. Prior research suggests starting a new job is an uncertain experience; we theorize that the COVID-19 pandemic creates additional environmental stressors that affect new hire engagement. First, we hypothesize that the occurrence of COVID-19 and unemployment rates relate negatively to engagement. Second, we theorize that the effects of the pandemic become more disruptive on new hire engagement as they gain tenure within the organization. Third, drawing from strategic management theory, we test whether States that introduce stronger COVID-19 policies help enhance the engagement of new hires. Examining a U.S. national sample of 12,577 newly hired (90 days or less) quick service restaurant employees across 9 months (January-September, 2020), we find support for these hypotheses. Subsequent model comparisons suggest there may be health stressors that shape engagement more strongly than purely economic stressors. These findings may be important because they highlight the experiences of workers more likely to be exposed to the pandemic and affected by COVID-related policies. Should the results generalize to other samples and jobs, this study offers potentially new research directions for understanding relationships between macro stressors and new hire perceptions and socialization. It also offers practical implications by helping organizations understand the importance of explicitly managing job insecurity, particularly in terms of COVID-19 policy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on job search behavior: An event transition perspective.

This study examines how job search behavior changed at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the weeks following the event's onset, and if the physical contact required by different jobs moderated these trends. Based on event system theory, we argue that the onset of the pandemic created a strong event because it was highly novel, disruptive, and critical. We test this by examining 16 weeks of job applications for 14 organizations that differ in terms of whether the jobs require employees to work from home or face-to-face. We use Bliese, Adler, and Flynn's (2017) transition framework and discontinuous random coefficient growth curve modeling to test the pandemic's effect on job search behavior both during the event onset and then the weeks following the onset. Importantly, we include a 9-week preonset baseline period to provide more rigorous tests of change. Results show that the onset of the pandemic created an immediate increase in job search behavior (job applications), and this effect endured into the postonset period. Job type moderated these trends, such that the onset and postonset applications were substantially greater for work-from-home jobs (which followed a negatively accelerated curve) compared to face-to-face jobs. These findings advance the job search literature by introducing event system theory and transition frameworks to better understand how and why events uniquely influence job search behavior over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).