ABSTRACT
One way that countries may differ in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic is how they withstand extreme adversity while maintaining their societal values and institutions. This study explored national resilience in Israel, the Philippines, and Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using Crisis in Context Theory, cross-national understanding of national resilience was examined by assessing measurement models, exploring country differences in perceptions, and determining its predictors. Data from an internationally diverse sample of 1,587 adults were collected using multiple measures and subsequently subjected to various analytical strategies. Results on the factor structure of NR-13 demonstrated acceptable fit of both first-order and higher-order models for each country, with generally high factor loadings. However, measurement invariance was only supported at the configural level for the first-order model. Among the three countries, national resilience was highest in Israel, followed by the Philippines, and lowest in Brazil. Taken collectively, both individual and ecological variables contributed a significant variance in national resilience in each country. Community resilience, quality of life, and perceived threats were consistently strong predictors of national resilience across countries. Results are discussed. The Community and Social Impact Statement of the study can be found in the Supplementary Material section.
ABSTRACT
Anchored on the Ecological Systems Theory, this study aimed to determine how psychological distress operates as an underlying mechanism in the impact of socio-ecological factors on the quality of life of Filipino adults during coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis. A cross-sectional online survey was conducted to assess perceptions of 401 adults on socio-ecological factors (i.e., safety at home, trust in public institutions, and financial difficulties), psychological distress, and quality of life during the early phase of COVID-19 community quarantine in the Philippines. Using latent variable path analysis, all three socio-ecological factors have significant direct effects on both psychological distress and quality of life. More importantly, the proposed model was confirmed in terms of a significant partial mediation of psychological distress on the impact of safety at home, trust in public institutions, and financial difficulties on the quality of life of Filipino adults. The study offers novel insights into the role of psychological distress as an underlying mechanism that operates on the influence of socio-ecological factors on the quality of life of adults during a global health crisis. Implications on psychological interventions and policies in preventing mental health problems vis-à-vis improving Filipinos' quality of life during the COVID-19 pandemic are discussed.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Psychological Distress , Adult , Cross-Sectional Studies , Humans , Pandemics , Quality of Life , SARS-CoV-2ABSTRACT
Do leaders who build a sense of shared social identity in their teams thereby protect them from the adverse effects of workplace stress? This is a question that the present paper explores by testing the hypothesis that identity leadership contributes to stronger team identification among employees and, through this, is associated with reduced burnout. We tested this model with unique datasets from the Global Identity Leadership Development (GILD) project with participants from all inhabited continents. We compared two datasets from 2016/2017 (n = 5290; 20 countries) and 2020/2021 (n = 7294; 28 countries) and found very similar levels of identity leadership, team identification and burnout across the five years. An inspection of the 2020/2021 data at the onset of and later in the COVID-19 pandemic showed stable identity leadership levels and slightly higher levels of both burnout and team identification. Supporting our hypotheses, we found almost identical indirect effects (2016/2017, b = -0.132; 2020/2021, b = -0.133) across the five-year span in both datasets. Using a subset of n = 111 German participants surveyed over two waves, we found the indirect effect confirmed over time with identity leadership (at T1) predicting team identification and, in turn, burnout, three months later. Finally, we explored whether there could be a "too-much-of-a-good-thing" effect for identity leadership. Speaking against this, we found a u-shaped quadratic effect whereby ratings of identity leadership at the upper end of the distribution were related to even stronger team identification and a stronger indirect effect on reduced burnout.