Death Reflection and Employee Work Behavior in the COVID-19 New Normal Time: The Role of Duty Orientation and Work Orientation

Shilong Wei, Yuting He, Wenxia Zhou, József Popp and Judit Oláh
Additional contact information
Shilong Wei: School of Labor and Human Resources, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China
Yuting He: School of Labor and Human Resources, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China
Wenxia Zhou: School of Labor and Human Resources, Renmin University of China, Beijing 100872, China
József Popp: John von Neumann University, National Bank of Hungary, Research Center, 6000 Kecskemét, Hungary
Judit Oláh: College of Business and Economics, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg 2006, South Africa

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 20, 1-15

Abstract: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a destructive affair for both workplace and community. However, with the strengthen of global anti-pandemic measures, COVID-19 becomes the norm and there is an increased trend for people to reflect on life or death. Moreover, regardless of its facilitating role in advancing organizational behavior (OB) study, very few studies empirically examine the effects of death reflection in the work domain. Drawing on the generativity theory, we identify how death reflection influences employees’ in-role and extra-role performance under the COVID-19 pandemic. A longitudinal study is performed by using multi-source data from 387 employees in China. Our results reveal that the COVID-19-triggered death reflection is associated with the stronger in-role performance and organizational citizenship behaviors. We find that duty orientation is the mechanism that can explain the effects of the COVID-19-triggered death reflection on employees’ work behaviors. Furthermore, employees who reflect on death with high (vs. low) career and calling orientations tend to have higher in-role and extra-role performance, while employees who reflect on death with low (vs. high) job orientation are likely to have lower in-role and extra-role performance.

Keywords: death reflection; duty orientation; work orientation; job performance; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/20/11174/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/20/11174/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:20:p:11174-:d:653000

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().