How the COVID-19 Outbreak Affected Organizational Citizenship Behavior in Emergency Construction Megaprojects: Case Study from Two Emergency Hospital Projects in Wuhan, China

Abstract

The rapid construction of emergency hospitals in areas with a severe COVID-19 outbreak was one of the effective ways to contain and fight the pandemic. However, such rapid construction megaprojects need more than a formal management system to drive the organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) of participants in order to compensate for the lack of formal rules and regulations. Two emergency hospitals especially built for COVID-19 are taken as case studies in this paper to establish a mechanism model and examine the impact of the perceived strength of the COVID-19 event on the emergency megaproject citizenship behavior (EMCB) based on affective events theory (AET). Data from 340 project participants in the two hospitals were collected and tested using structural equation modeling. The results demonstrate that first, the positive affect induced by the COVID-19 event is the direct antecedent that promotes EMCB. Participants' cognition of event criticality and event novelty was seen to have a positive driving effect on the positive affect. However, their cognition of event urgency and event disruption only triggers negative affect. Second, the positive affect induced by the COVID-19 event was seen to have a strong positive and direct promoting effect on the six dimensions of EMCB. Contrary to expectations, the negative affect induced by the COVID-19 event does not significantly influence the six dimensions of EMCB. This study provides empirical suggestions for project managers on how to motivate EMCB through public emergency management to help achieve project objectives.

Operation Warp Speed: Projects responding to the COVID-19 pandemic

“…More than 100 subcontractors such as the Wuhan Construction Group and Wuhan Airport Development Group participated in the construction ( Wang et al, 2021 ). The regional utility, Wuhan Power Supply Bureau, requested a power management company (Eaton) to help connect to utility power for both hospitals.…”

“…The second was adequate labour supply . According to Wang et al (2021) , more than 1500 managers and workers were part of the Huoshenshan hospital project, while Leishenshan hospital involved more than 2500 managers and 22000 workers. A lot of employees and workers gave up celebrating the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) with their family members and joined in the construction of the emergency hospitals.…”

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“…Although, these studies have talked about implications of pandemic with respect to developing countries (Wang, Fu, Gao, Shang, Gao, Xing, Ni, Yuan, Qiao & Mi, 2021;Hansen, 2020), still they ignored potential impacts of the COVID-19 that could be viewed at implementation stage of the construction projects. Keeping in view the outcomes form limited sources, the literature review of construction project is distributed into three school of thoughts.…”

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“…Because the COVID-19 pandemic is a new phenomenon that emerged only recently and is still ongoing, previous studies related to it are still limited (Assaad and El-Adaway 2021a). Nonetheless, several countries have already tried to identify its impact on their construction sector, including the United States (Alsharef et al 2021), China (Shiao 2020;Wang et al 2021), and Korea (You 2020). However, these studies have been limited to the analysis of phenomena at the macro level and did not provide specific impacts at the field level.…”