How to Maintain Compliance Among Host Country Employees as the COVID-19 Pandemic Fades: An Attempt to Apply Conservation of Resources Theory to the Workplace

Keisuke Kokubun (), Yoshiaki Ino and Kazuyoshi Ishimura
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Keisuke Kokubun: Graduate School of Management, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan
Yoshiaki Ino: IEWRI Japan Co., Ltd., Tokyo 107-0062, Japan
Kazuyoshi Ishimura: IEWRI Japan Co., Ltd., Tokyo 107-0062, Japan

Merits, 2025, vol. 5, issue 1, 1-23

Abstract: As the fear of the spread of COVID-19 has faded, governments around the world are moving to lift strict behavioral restrictions. How should human resource management at overseas subsidiaries adapt to these system changes? To find the answer, this paper clarifies the anxiety of employees working at overseas subsidiaries after the strict behavioral restrictions introduced by governments during the spread of COVID-19 have been lifted, as well as the relationship between psychological and social resources and intention to leave. To this end, we applied and verified the analytical model of “China 2020”, which was conducted on 2973 people in East and South China from February to May 2020, the results of which have been published in previous studies, to psychological questionnaire data from “Wuhan 2023”, which was conducted on 813 people in Wuhan City from January to March 2023. As a result, it was shown that the analytical model based on the conservation of resources theory (COR) can be applied not only to China 2020 but also to Wuhan 2023. This study proposes an analytical framework that can be widely applied across time and place and can be used as a reference for foreign companies that lack local information on disasters that expand while the nature and impact of the damage change.

Keywords: COVID-19; psychological resources; social resources; anxiety; fatigue; compliance; turnover intention; nationality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J L M (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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