Enhancing Employee Job Satisfaction Responding to COVID-19: The Role of Organizational Adaptive Practices and Psychological Resilience

Abstract

Purpose

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically affected all aspects of people’s lives and work, negatively impacting personal well-being and job satisfaction. Based on the conservation of resources theory, this study examines the relationship of organizational adaptive practices (OAP) responding to COVID-19 and psychological resilience (PR) with employee job satisfaction (JS) while incorporating the mediating role of emotional exhaustion (EE).

Methods

We surveyed 340 employees from China through an online questionnaire, which was used under convenience sampling and finally recovered a valid sample size of 314. We used SPSS and AMOS to analyze the correlation and hypothesis testing of the collected data through structural equation modelling (SEM) and bootstrapping.

Results

Both OAP and PR facilitate JS and inhibit employee EE. EE negatively predicted employee JS. EE mediated both the relationship between OAP and subordinate JS and the relationship between PR and subordinate JS.

Conclusion

The study provides a new perspective on increasing JS during the COVID-19 pandemic, thereby expanding the scope of the antecedents of employee JS in crisis situations. It also reveals the mediating role of EE and deepens the research on the mechanism by which OAP and PR affect individuals, providing practical guidance for organizations to improve employee satisfaction in sudden public crisis situations.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• organizational adaptive practices
• psychological resilience
• job satisfaction
• emotional exhaustion

Ethics Statement

The study was conducted with the informed consent of the subjects and has been approved by the Internal Review Board of School of business administration, Anhui University of Finance and Economics. In addition, we require all participants to provide a informed consent form on their behalf. Last but not least, our research is in line with the Helsinki Declaration.

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.

Additional information

Funding

The current Research did not include formal financial funding and/or support. The authors declared that preparation of this manuscript was not supported by any external funding and is the effort of the authors included.