The Conflicting Impact of COVID-19’s Health and Economic Crises on Helping

Abstract

Helping behaviors are considered critical for business and societal recovery in light of economic crises and natural disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic that has both economic and health disaster elements. However, because the current COVID-19 pandemic has both of these elements, it is unclear how helping may be impacted. Economic crisis research suggests that such events are associated with less helping, whereas disaster research suggests that such events are associated with greater helping. We pair the event system theory (Morgeson, F. P., Mitchell, T. R., & Liu, D. (2015). Event system theory: An event-oriented approach to the organizational sciences. Academy of Management Review, 40(4), 515-537) with these two logics (economic downturn and disaster) to suggest that health and economic threats within the COVID-19 pandemic operate with potentially opposing forces on helping-related outcomes. To test these ideas at a macro-level, we examined internet search volume for recession, COVID-19, and interest in helping. At a micro-level, we examined the relationships between work- hour insecurity and perceived job-related COVID-19 risk—two salient COVID-19-related economic and health threats—and helping customers and coworkers. Consistent with economic crisis logic, macro-level concern about recession was negatively associated with interest in helping. Moreover, at the individual level, work-hour insecurity negatively predicted helping coworkers. Consistent with disaster logic, at the individual level, perceived job-related COVID-19 threat was positively associated with helping coworkers and negatively associated with helping customers. These findings suggest that the specific feature of the COVID-19 event system (economic versus health) and the target (organizational insiders versus outsiders) matter for shaping helping behavior. These findings have implications for helping during crises that involve economic and/or disaster elements.

Using machine learning to investigate the public’s emotional responses to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“…Particularly relevant for our purposes, events can co-occur as part of a larger event system and can be long-lasting (Morgeson et al, 2015;Shoss et al, 2020).…”

An absorptive capacity-based systems view of Covid-19 in the small business economy

“…More recently, especially in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, scholars have explored the relationship between crises and individual decision-making behaviors (Shoss et al, 2021). Using event systems theory, they show that perceptions of the nature and severity of the Covid-10 crisis are negatively related to helping behaviors, i.e., altruist actions targeted toward another, at the individual level of analysis.…”

Abilities, Motivations, and Opportunities of Furloughed Employees in the Context of Covid-19: Preliminary Evidence From the UK

“…Although research exists to examine how individuals deal with the job insecurity resulting from national crises (Adkins et al, 2001 ) and how such crisis management affects organizational and management levels (James et al, 2011 ; Stoker et al, 2019 ), our knowledge of its effect on individual employees is scant (Perrewé et al, 2012 ). While this is inevitably linked to the recency of this unprecedented event and its unique circumstances (Shoss et al, 2021 ), greater understanding of the impact of furlough on employees would enable organizations to develop practices and processes encouraging development and increasing motivation and commitment in such difficult times.…”