Perceived Risk of COVID-19 and Employee Decision-Making: How Psychological Distress during the Pandemic Increases Negative Performance Outcomes among Healthcare Workers.

In this research, we examined how COVID-19 impacts employee decision-making and performance, knowing that this virus has negatively affected public health, crippled economies, and transformed social and business environments across the globe. To quantitatively test our specific hypotheses regarding the effects of employees' perceived risk of COVID-19 and psychological distress on negative performance outcomes, we surveyed 443 healthcare workers who were employed by a group of private hospitals in Zimbabwe. These essential workers were delivering day-to-day frontline services with high exposure to COVID-19 during the pandemic. We find that employees' perceived risk of COVID-19 increases their disengagement, turnover intention, burnout, and low morale at a p < 0.05 significance level. These latter relationships are mediated by employees' psychological distress at a p < 0.05 significance level. Our findings shed light on how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the cognitions and behaviors of the frontline workers who are vulnerable to this contagious disease. Turnover intentions are amplified among healthcare employees, due to their perceived risk of COVID-19 and the resulting psychological distress. Similarly, burnout becomes predominant as these workers worry about contracting the coronavirus due to the poor working conditions they face. As such, our research confirms that the pandemic has intensified the precariousness of work and challenge of managing employee performance, especially for frontline healthcare workers.

Measuring Consumer Engagement in Omnichannel Retailing: The Mobile In-Store Experience (MIX) Index.

We draw insights from Activity Theory within the field of human-computer interaction to quantitatively measure a mobile in-store experience (MIX), which includes the suite of shopping activities and retail services that a consumer can engage in when using their mobile device in brick-and-mortar stores. We developed and validated a nine-item, formative MIX index using survey data collected from fashion consumers in the United States (n = 1,267), United Kingdom (n = 370), Germany (n = 362), and France (n = 219). As survey measures of consumer engagement in omnichannel retailing using a mobile device, the index items with stronger factor loadings described in-store shopping activities whereas those with weaker factor loadings described activities related to behavioral targeting and social networking. These results suggest that retailers should give consumers the autonomy to independently find, evaluate and purchase merchandise in brick-and-mortar stores, thereby enabling them to co-create personalized shopping experiences as active participants within an omnichannel retail servicescape. Our findings also suggest that retailers should provide consumers with more authentic ways to build community and brand affiliations than mobile marketing and social media promotions. In-store activities should not simply be a migration of pre-existing e-commerce capabilities onto mobile devices. An engaging mobile in-store experience should be an amalgam of physical and digital activities that produce a seamless shopping journey and leverage the unique properties of mobile devices - ultra-portability, location sensitivity, untetheredness, and personalization. Retail executives can use the validated MIX index to prepare strategic investments in mobile technology applications and capabilities for retail stores within their omnichannel operations. The nine-item MIX index is also well-suited for consumer surveys, which also makes it an attractive measure of consumer engagement in omnichannel retailing for future academic research.

Providers' Initial Trust on an Organization-Sponsored Sharing Platform: The Framing of Coworker Collaborative Consumption.

Organization-sponsored sharing platforms extend the sharing economy to workplaces by connecting employees in a private online community where they can socially exchange goods and services with coworkers. Employees share costs but do not earn income during this collaborative consumption. Furthermore, employers pay for their employees to have access to the platform technology and any related transaction fees. Trust is a crucial antecedent for engagement on sharing platforms because it helps mitigate risks during collaborative consumption. However, the literature on trust in the sharing economy has focused almost exclusively on platforms that broker peer-to-peer rental transactions rather than social exchanges. There is also a lack of research about providers' perspectives. We address these gaps by investigating the nature of trust among employees who initially provide goods and services on an organization-sponsored sharing platform. We also explore how these employees' initial trust influences their collaborative consumption with coworkers. Through abductive analysis of 22 interviews with 15 providers on an organization-sponsored sharing platform, we shed light on how employees initially develop trust when providing goods and services to coworkers. By integrating prior research on initial trust among employees and cognitive framing with in-depth qualitative insights, we develop a conceptual model depicting how identity, interaction and issue frames shape these providers' beliefs about coworker trustworthiness and intended sharing strategy. In particular, our empirical findings reveal that employees' social categorization, illusions of control and engagement motive framed their initial trust and enactment of collaborative consumption as citizens in a community or consumers in a marketplace.