Supervisor companionate love expression and elicited subordinate gratitude as moral-emotional facilitators of voice amid COVID-19

ABSTRACT

Emerging research shows that moral emotions can promote individual prosocial behaviors and adaptation during adversity. Integrating Affective Events Theory (AET) with two functionalist theories of emotions (social functions of emotions and broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions), we extend this line of research by focusing on other-oriented moral emotions as facilitators of individuals’ adaptive behavior of voice during a major crisis. We conducted a four-wave survey study with 111 U.S. working adults during the early (acute) stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our path analyses in AMOS, coupled with PROCESS-aided analyses in SPSS, indicated that supervisors’ companionate love expression elicited gratitude in subordinates, particularly when subordinates perceived high uncertainty of the crisis, which, in turn, broadened subordinates’ in-role perceptions of, and promoted engagement in, voice behaviors. Our findings extend AET in meaningful ways and contribute to research on the moral emotions of companionate love and gratitude, stressing their value in managerial practice.

KEYWORDS:

• Moral emotions
• companionate love
• gratitude
• voice
• role perception
• COVID-19

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2020-coronavirus-cases-world-map/.

2. The first peak of the pandemic (March to May 2020) in the U.S. represents a clean naturalistic crisis setting to test our hypotheses related to perceived uncertainty, as later stages were confounded by BLM movement protests, pre- and post-election focus and finally, a riot at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, which could be alternative stimuli influencing participant’s feelings and behaviors.

3. Hills, M. Covid-19 in the US: Bleak Winter Ahead as Deaths Surge. Available online: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us- canada-54966531.

4. https://time.com/5903673/record-daily-coronavirus-cases/.

5. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6935a2.htm.

6. A recent report by Moss et al. (2020) also indicated that the diversity and all major characteristics of Mturk respondents remained stable during the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic (the comparison data is available up to May 2020).

7. At the time of data collection, 74% of the participants worked remotely, which was consistent with the overall trend in the U.S. at that time (as about 2/3 of all U.S. employees worked remotely in some capacity during March-May of 2020) and were employed in a variety of industries, with the biggest categories including 18% in education, 14.4% in IT, 12.6% in finance; 9% in healthcare, 9% in government and 8.1% in manufacturing.