The leadership style that is most appropriate for the given circumstance will determine whether or not a leader is successful. It means what great leaders should do while working with a diverse workforce. They should be emotionally intelligent in order to understand their team members and modify their leadership style in order to achieve the best out of them. Employee engagement in the workplace is crucial for firms, but different factors can keep employees motivated. Work engagement activities, particularly those supported by the human resource department, have typically been observed as the primary factors that motivate employees. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought about a number of adjustments. The primary goal of this study is to examine how virtual human resource practices and paternal leadership affected employee retention in COVID-19, with the function of work engagement activities as a mediator. The data were gathered from 250 Portuguese Professors who were instructing undergraduate students using a survey instrument. Smart-PLS partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to assess the study’s hypotheses. It has been discovered that paternalistic leadership, also known as a resource provider with a benevolent attitude, has a direct impact on job performance and employee intention to leave the job, but during a pandemic, where the role of the government in supporting their nationals was not as significant in Portugal as it could be, people also faced their leaders of organizations as opportunists. Not all, but most paternal organizations took financial decisions to safeguard their business and were not people-oriented. Now the dignity of the paternal leader on the canvas of leadership is fading. This neo-normal approach will contribute to the literature on paternal leadership.