Flattening the Latent Growth Curve? Explaining Within-Person Changes in Employee Well-Being during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic represents one of the greatest global crises in modern history. In addition to recession and high unemployment, agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warn that stressors associated with a pandemic can cause increased strains, including difficulty concentrating, anxiety, and decreased mental health (CDC, 2020). Two general frameworks that explain these stressor-strain relationships over time include stress-reaction and adaptation models. Stress-reaction models suggest that stressors, such as heightened job demands due to the pandemic, accumulate over time and thus prolonged exposure to these stressors results in both immediate and long-term strain; conversely, adaptation models suggest that people adapt to stressors over time, such that strains produced by ongoing stressors tend to dissipate. After controlling for county-level COVID-19 cases, we found that (a) workers in general exhibited decreasing cognitive weariness and psychological symptoms over time, providing support for the adaptation model; (b) on-site workers experienced increasing physical fatigue over time, supporting the stress-reaction model among those workers; and (c) engaging in recovery behaviors was associated with improvements in cognitive weariness and psychological symptoms for all workers. We also found that our Time 1 outcomes were significantly different than pre-pandemic norms, such that our participants displayed lower initial levels of job-related burnout and higher initial levels of psychological symptoms than pre-pandemic norms. Furthermore, supplemental qualitative data support our quantitative findings for recovery behaviors. These findings have important implications for understanding workers' responses to the pandemic and they can help inform organizational practice.

Portrait of a workplace deviant: A clearer picture of the Big Five and Dark Triad as predictors of workplace deviance.

Despite the large and growing number of studies on workplace deviance, the field currently lacks a complete understanding of who perpetrates this behavior. In one stream of research, scholars have examined the relationship between more "traditional" personality traits (i.e., the Big Five, which consists of conscientiousness, agreeableness, emotional stability, openness to experience, and extraversion) and workplace deviance. In an alternate stream, scholars have examined the relationship between workplace deviance and more malevolent personality traits (i.e., the Dark Triad, which consists of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy). We synthesize these two perspectives using a meta-analytic approach to examine the incremental importance and relative importance of the Dark Triad beyond the Big Five for predicting workplace deviance. Our results supported our incremental importance hypothesis, as the Dark Triad predicted variance in both forms of workplace deviance beyond the Big Five. However, the results of the relative importance analyses were more nuanced, as agreeableness, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy were the most important predictors of interpersonal deviance, and conscientiousness, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy were the most important predictors of organizational deviance. Overall, our results make a contribution by explicating the relative effects of employee personality domains to paint a clearer picture of a workplace deviant. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).