Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic, as a typical crisis event, has disrupted employees’ lives and organizations’ workplaces, creating significant uncertainty and stress. Although existing research has emphasized the crucial role of individual impression management in managing uncertainty, no researchers have yet examined the potential link between uncertainty related to the COVID-19 pandemic and employee impression management. Therefore, drawing upon the conservation of resources theory and regulatory focus theory, we investigated when and how COVID-19-induced work uncertainty affects employee impression management (i.e., assertive and defensive impression management). Furthermore, we explored how regulatory focus plays a crucial role in connecting decreased job security to impression management behavior. To examine the proposed model, we gathered data from a sample of 571 employees working in China. The results showed COVID-19-induced work uncertainty can positively impact employee impression management, and job security mediates this relationship. Additionally, the results demonstrated a positive correlation between the interaction of regulatory focus and job security and the adoption of assertive or defensive impression management. These findings make a valuable contribution to the research on work uncertainty and impression management, further deepening our insights into the application of impression management strategies within crisis contexts.
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This paper was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds of Shandong University and the Natural Science Fund of Shandong Province of China (ZR2023QG008).
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Liu, X., Han, C., Xia, Y. et al. Different concerns, different choices: How does COVID-19-induced work uncertainty influence employees' impression management?. Curr Psychol 43, 12508–12521 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-05261-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-05261-1