Is Purchase Behavior Different for Consumers with Long COVID?

COVID-19 has generated an uncertain environment, which has motivated changes in consumers' behavior globally. However, previous studies have not clarified if these effects are equally strong throughout the population. In this research, we want to analyze if there are behavioral differences between long-COVID consumers and others. For this purpose, we analyzed a sample of 522 consumers divided into three groups depending on their type of exposure to the disease: those with long COVID; ones that had recovered from COVID-19; and those that had never had COVID-19. The results show that the effect that COVID-19 has on purchase behavior differs depending on the type of exposure to the disease. In fact, those with long COVID experienced more pleasure when purchasing than other people, but they needed higher trust levels in the enterprises to purchase from them, since that reduces their perception of uncertainty. Furthermore, for long-COVID individuals, an organization's legitimacy level is even more important than for other consumer groups with less contact with the disease.

How sustainable human resources management helps in the evaluation and planning of employee loyalty and retention: Can social capital make a difference?

Researchers establish that the current challenges of human resources management to attract and retain talent are based on fostering and increasing the participation of relationships with employees and sustainably managing the organization and teams. The objective of this article is to evaluate the effect that sustainable human resource management has on social capital, and employee retention and loyalty programs. The information required to carry out the empirical analysis was obtained from an online survey to Spanish universities. Data processing was conducted by using the PLS-SEM technique. The results obtained show that social sustainability actions influence the social capital perceived by employees significantly and that social capital influences their loyalty and retention significantly. However, we found that social sustainability actions influence employee loyalty and retention significantly and positively only when it mediates between social capital. This research contributes to the management of organizations and suggests human capital managers to have a greater relational management of human resources in the connection, involvement and transparency of their social sustainability actions in order to achieve greater loyalty and retention ratios, better performance of the organization and, in general, a greater benefit for society.