Recently, CSM doctoral researcher Mrs Junyi (Amy) Xie, who is supervised by CSM Associate Director (Enterprise) Dr Keme Ifie and CSM Director Prof Thorsten Gruber, gave a presentation titled “How do organizational and individual mindfulness serve as complimentary resources for frontline employees in the peculiar times of the Covid-19 pandemic” as part of our CSM Spring Seminar Series.

Abstract

Navigating the increasingly uncertain business world requires organizations and employees to be highly adaptive to threats and changes. During COVID-19, the dual threats to health and job security have been especially salient for frontline employees. Drawing on the job demands-resources (JD-R) model, we investigated individual and organizational mindfulness as valuable resources, which influence employee outcomes of preventative behaviors, emotional exhaustion, and job performance both directly, and indirectly through threat appraisals. We find that individual and organizational mindfulness influence threat appraisals in a “counterbalanced manner”: individual mindfulness decreases threat appraisals, while organizational mindfulness heightens the perceived threat of contracting COVID-19. The threat to health further serves as a double-edged sword, predicting both emotional exhaustion and preventative behaviors, while job insecurity impairs all employee outcomes. Based on these findings, we provide key implications for research and practice, and future research directions.

Guest Speaker Biography
Mrs Junyi (Amy) Xie is currently a doctoral researcher in the Centre for Service Management at Loughborough University. Her current research interest lies in investigating frontline employee experience, for example, their emotion regulation at work, adaption, well-being, and performance. Mrs Xie has published her work in Behaviour & Information Technology and the Journal of Business Research.

We would like to thank Mrs Xie for her excellent presentation.