Caring for their own: How firm actions to protect essential workers and CEO benevolence influenced stakeholder sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Abstract

Whereas many workplaces shut down following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many others in essential industries had to remain operational, thus exposing their employees to COVID-19's inherent dangers. These firms were pressed to take immediate action to protect their employees' safety and financial well-being. However, firms varied considerably in the degree to which they took action, and stakeholders appeared to take notice. Leveraging attribution theory, we build theory around the impact of firm actions to protect employee safety and compensation on stakeholder sentiment toward the firm. We further examined how firm leadership helped shape stakeholder sentiment by theorizing about the joint impact of actions with Chief Executive Officer (CEO) benevolence. We built a unique, multisourced data set and tested our theory on a sample of public firms in the consumer staples sector. Our longitudinal analysis of positive stakeholder sentiment expressed on social media demonstrated the importance of these immediate firm actions on sentiment in the initial months of the pandemic. Specifically, firm compensation actions were associated with a growth in positive sentiment over these months, particularly when made by CEOs with high benevolence, whereas firm safety actions led to growth in positive sentiment but only when made by CEOs with low benevolence. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of firm actions and leadership at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Reflections on the Journal of Applied Psychology in times of change.

“…In terms of individual differences, death and mortality attitudes and perceptions of both employees (e.g., Hu et al, 2020) and leaders (e.g., Li et al, 2021) were incorporated into 12% ( n = 6) of the accepted articles. Twelve percent ( n = 6) of the articles focused on others’ reactions to the pandemic, including observer reactions to essential workers (e.g., Yuan, Cockburn, et al, 2021), stakeholder reactions to how organizations managed crisis (Steinbach et al, 2021), and public sentiment about remote work (e.g., Zhang et al, 2021). These articles, in particular, provide a perspective that we do not typically examine in our science but yielded unique insight into the many ways people reacted to the pandemic…”

Disparity in Occupational Health Risk During the Pandemic

“…22 As such, essential workers are often exposed to higher risks and hazards, and corresponding policies are put forward to ensure protection measures for this group. 11,23,24 Policy Interventions in the Risk Faced by Frontline Essential Workers in the Pandemic…”

“…The lack of occupational rights and entitlements, such as paid sick leave, national insurance, and social security payments, also lends them in the plight of working with illness, which could increase the risk of outbreak within the workplace 22 . As such, essential workers are often exposed to higher risks and hazards, and corresponding policies are put forward to ensure protection measures for this group 11,23,24 …”

“… 22 As such, essential workers are often exposed to higher risks and hazards, and corresponding policies are put forward to ensure protection measures for this group. 11 , 23 , 24 …”

Psychological Prediction of Digital Economy Consumption Considering Deep Neural Network

“…(3) The data relationship satisfies nonlinearity. The RBF NN can approximate any nonlinear relational expression while avoiding getting trapped in local minima [15][16].…”