Extreme Extra-Organizational Events and Employee Effectiveness: the Case of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The prevalence and frequency of extreme extra-organizational events (e.g., wildfires, floods, hurricanes, pandemics, mass shootings, etc.) over the past two decades raises the concern of their spillover effects on organizations. Extant research suggests that the disruptive nature of these events has implications for employee well-being and work attitudes. However, it remains unclear as to how and why some employees remain effective during such events while others fail to do so. We explore these questions using the backdrop of full-time remote work during the COVID-19 global pandemic. Specifically, we argue that maintaining remote work self-efficacy or the confidence in personal capabilities to perform the job while working remotely can be critical if employees are to remain effective under circumstances relating to the pandemic. In addition, we make the case that two extra-organizational stressors associated with the pandemic—COVID-19 anxiety and employee isolation—can erode remote work self-efficacy. We argue that COVID-19 anxiety negatively influences remote work self-efficacy, and thereby adversely affecting remote work adaptation, task performance, and innovative performance. These effects, we propose, are exacerbated by the isolation that employees experience due to full-time remote work brought on due to pandemic. We found support for our theory across two studies: a field study involving executives and their managers during the nationwide lockdown in India and an experimental vignette study using working adults from a North American online panel during the COVID-19 pandemic.