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The recent COVID-19 pandemic posed a challenge to employee well-being and will have a lasting impact on how safe employees feel about their work environment. This study aims at examining: (1) the impact of safety perception of employees on their job attitudes; and (2) what factors affect their expectations that their organizations will effectively protect them from potential health threats. Using data from the U.S. Federal Government, this study divided organizational responses to COVID-19 aimed at protecting their employees into the following three types: protecting the employees while working on site, reducing the number of employees working on-site, and providing mental and health assistance. The effects of these organizational responses were analysed separately, and regression analysis was performed with these factors with regards to employees’ safety perception. The results showed that the first group of measures, protecting the employees while they are in the workplace, had generally the most significant influences on employees’ feeling of safety. The attempt to protect those in vulnerable medical conditions was also seen as significant. These findings show that organizations need to protect their employees in the workplaces during a health crisis.

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Organizational justice is known to help promote organizational sustainability. The literature has explained the impact of organizational justice relying heavily on the social exchange perspective, the idea that employees are motivated to show favorable attitudes in return for the fair rewards that organization has provided. To the contrary, little attention has been given to the proposition that it affects employee’s attitudes by increasing their intrinsic motivation. The latter has a greater implication of sustainable management since intrinsic motivation of its employees is the key to the sustained success of an organization. This approach can be called a value-based perspective. To fill that gap, this study examined the mediating effects of both the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation links between organizational justice and employee satisfaction. The analysis revealed that the indirect mediating effects of intrinsic motivation were greater than those of extrinsic motivation for procedural and interactional justice, while the mediating effect of extrinsic motivation was greater when it comes to distributive justice. In addition, the sum of the indirect effects of intrinsic motivation was comparable to that of extrinsic motivation. This result implies that the mediating effects of intrinsic motivation are as important as those of extrinsic motivation, confirming our prediction that organizational justice contributes to organizational sustainability via the path that has not been verified so far.

Purpose Addressing low performers has been an important issue for government. The purpose of this paper is to examine what practices of performance management are effective in reducing the proportion of low performers in the US federal government. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted the binary logit regression analysis and multinomial regression analysis. Findings Analyzing the Merit Principle Survey 2016, the authors found that the dismissal of low performing employees and the formal performance improvement plan (PIP) is the most effective in reducing the proportion of low performers. To the contrary, the within-grade-increase did not have a significant influence on the proportion of low performers. Moreover, using the performance appraisal for the purpose of reassigning employees to the position that better match employees’ talent increased the number of low performers in work units. Research limitations/implications Research limitations are as follows. First, the performance measure for this study was the percentage of employees rated as unsuccessful. Second, the pseudo-R2 indicated that the proposed model explained only the small, albeit significant, portion of the total variance in employee performance. Lastly, this study used a cross-sectional research design that may impede the validity of inference of causalities. Practical implications According to a recent news article (Rein, 2018), Trump signed an executive order that limits the stable benefits associated with government employment such as, limiting pay associated with union work and negotiating more stringent union contracts. These measures are largely aimed at eliminating low performing employees rather than attempting to improve their performances through carefully designed training programs. Although removing low performers may be an option, the results indicate that providing assistance in order to develop employee knowledge and skills through the PIP have a comparable impact on reducing low performers. Originality/value These findings imply that the use of performance evaluation for developmental or sanctioning purpose is more effective than reassignment or incentive purpose.