An extended health belief model for COVID-19: understanding the media-based processes leading to social distancing and panic buying.

Building on the health belief model (HBM), this research tests, over six months, how the exposure to COVID-related information in the media affects fear, which in turn conditions beliefs about the severity of the virus, susceptibility of getting the virus, and benefits of safety measures. These health beliefs ultimately lead to social distancing and panic buying. As a first contribution, we find that fear is not directly triggered by the objective severity of a crisis, but rather formed over time by the way individuals are exposed to media. Second, we show that fear affects behaviors through the components of the HBM which relate to the risks/benefits of a situation. Last, we find that critical thinking about media content amplifies the "adaptive" responses of our model (e.g., health beliefs, social distancing) and reduces its "maladaptive" responses (e.g., panic buying). Interestingly, we note that the beneficial effect of critical thinking about media content disappears as the level of fear increases over time. The implications of these findings for policymakers, media companies, and theory are further discussed. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11747-022-00865-8.

The Power of Negative Affect during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Negative Affect Leverages Need Satisfaction to Foster Work Centrality.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented disruptions in organizations and people's lives by generating uncertainty, anxiety, and isolation for most employees around the globe. Such disruptive context may have prompted employees to reconsider their identification with their work role, defined as work centrality. As such reconsideration may have deep implications, we reasoned that individuals' affective dispositions would influence work centrality across time during the pandemic. Drawing upon the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions and the met expectations underpinnings of negative affectivity, we predicted that positive and negative affect would foster, albeit for different reasons, work centrality. Based on self-determination theory, we further expected the fulfilment of the needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence to enhance the effect of positive and negative affectivity. Based on a three-wave study (N = 379) conducted during the COVID-19 lockdown followed by a reopening of the economy in Canada (i.e., May to July 2020), we found negative affectivity, but not positive affectivity, to drive work centrality over time, and found this effect to be enhanced at high levels of the satisfaction of the needs for autonomy and relatedness. The implications of these results for our understanding of the role of trait affectivity in times of crisis are discussed.

L’anxiété liée à la COVID-19: Une analyse de ses effets en milieu de travail

Résumé L’anxiété générée par la crise sanitaire de la COVID-19 est un phénomène nouveau dont les effets sont largement inconnus. Pour explorer cette question, nous avons mené une étude auprès de 650 employés de ministères au Québec pendant la première vague de la pandémie qui examine les effets de l’anxiété liée à la COVID-19 sur quatre indicateurs de l’adaptation au travail : l’engagement au travail, l’engagement organisationnel, l’habilitation psychologique et l’épuisement du moi. Tout en contrôlant les effets de facteurs contextuels pertinents, les analyses indiquent que l’anxiété liée à la COVID-19 est positivement liée à l’engagement organisationnel et à l’épuisement du moi, et négativement liée à l’habilitation psychologique. En revanche, elle ne présente pas de lien significatif avec l’engagement au travail. The anxiety engendered by the sanitary crisis of the COVID-19 is a novel emotional phenomenon. Due to its recency and novelty, this form of anxiety and its effects are largely unknown. To explore this issue, we conducted a study among 650 civil agents of the Quebec government during the first wave of the pandemic that examined the effects of COVID-19-triggered anxiety on four indicators of work adjustment: job engagement, organizational commitment, psychological empowerment, and ego depletion. While controlling for the effect of relevant contextual factors, our analyses indicate that COVID-19-triggered anxiety is positively related to organizational commitment and ego depletion and negatively related to psychological empowerment. In contrast, COVID-19-triggered anxiety was not significantly related to job engagement.