Distressed and distracted by COVID-19 during high-stakes virtual interviews: The role of job interview anxiety on performance and reactions.

Employers have increasingly turned to virtual interviews to facilitate online, socially distanced selection processes in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there is little understanding about the experience of job candidates in these virtual interview contexts. We draw from Event System Theory (Morgeson et al., 2015) to advance and test a conceptual model that focuses on a high-stress, high-stakes setting and integrates literatures on workplace stress with literatures on applicant reactions. We predict that when applicants ruminate about COVID-19 during an interview and have higher levels of COVID-19 exhaustion, they will have higher levels of anxiety during virtual interviews, which in turn relates to reduced interview performance, lower perceptions of fairness, and reduced intentions to recommend the organization. Further, we predict that three factors capturing COVID-19 as an enduring and impactful event (COVID-19 duration, COVID-19 cases, COVID-19 deaths) will be positively related to COVID-19 exhaustion. We tested our propositions with 8,343 job applicants across 373 companies and 93 countries/regions. Consistent with predictions, we found a positive relationship between COVID-19 rumination and interview anxiety, and this relationship was stronger for applicants who experienced higher (vs. lower) levels of COVID-19 exhaustion. In turn, interview anxiety was negatively related to interview performance, fairness perceptions, and recommendation intentions. Moreover, using a relevant subset of the data (n = 6,136), we found that COVID-19 duration and deaths were positively related to COVID-19 exhaustion. This research offers several insights for understanding the virtual interview experience embedded in the pandemic and advances the literature on applicant reactions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Making daily decisions to work from home or to work in the office: The impacts of daily work- and COVID-related stressors on next-day work location.

To protect workers' safety while gradually resuming on-site operations amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations are offering employees the flexibility to decide their work location on a daily basis (i.e., whether to work from home or to work in the office on a particular day). However, little is known about what factors drive employees' daily decisions to work from home versus office during the pandemic. Taking a social ecological perspective, we conceptualize employees' daily choice of work location (home vs. office) as a way to cope with stressors they have encountered on the previous day, and conducted a daily diary study to examine how five categories of work-related and COVID-related stressors during the pandemic (identified through a pilot interview study) may jointly predict employees' next-day work location. We collected data over five workdays from 127 participants working in a Chinese IT company which allowed employees to choose their work location on a daily basis amid the pandemic. We found that experiencing more work-family boundary stressors and work coordination stressors on a certain day were associated with a greater likelihood of working in the office (vs. at home) on the next day, while experiencing more workload stressors prompted employees to work at home (vs. in the office) on the next day. Furthermore, we found that COVID-19 infection-related stressors moderated the effects of technology stressors and workload stressors on next-day work location. Our research findings offer implications for understanding the driving factors of daily work location choices during and beyond the pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

The psychological implications of COVID-19 on employee job insecurity and its consequences: The mitigating role of organization adaptive practices.

The current study aims to understand the detrimental effects of COVID-19 pandemic on employee job insecurity and its downstream outcomes, as well as how organizations could help alleviate such harmful effects. Drawing on event system theory and literature on job insecurity, we conceptualize COVID-19 as an event relevant to employees' work, and propose that event strength (i.e., novelty, disruption, and criticality) of COVID-19 influences employee job insecurity, which in turn affects employee work and non-work outcomes. We also identified important organization adaptive practices responding to COVID-19 based on a preliminary interview study, and examined its role in mitigating the undesired effects of COVID-19 event strength. Results from a two-wave lagged survey study indicated that employees' perceived COVID-19 event novelty and disruption (but not criticality) were positively related to their job insecurity, which in turn was positively related to their emotional exhaustion, organizational deviance, and saving behavior. Moreover, organization adaptive practices mitigated the effects of COVID-19 event novelty and criticality (but not disruption) on job insecurity. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).