Department of Psychology, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Department of Organization, Open Universiteit, Heerlen, The Netherlands.
Psychol Health Med. 2022 Oct;27(9):2030-2042. doi: 10.1080/13548506.2021.2007965. Epub 2021 Nov 24.
Healthcare professionals are the vanguard of battling the COVID-19 pandemic and they experience major challenges associated with their jobs in the context of this pandemic. We carried out a survey of 253 healthcare professionals and 189 employees working in other domains to explore differences in how they adapted to COVID-19. Our results show that healthcare professionals perceive a higher mortality threat, lower job satisfaction and engage in fewer counterproductive work behaviors compared to respondents from other professions. Building on the tenets of the Terror Management Theory, we show that dispositional differences in death anxiety are the main drivers of perceived mortality threat in relation to COVID-19, yet this positive association is weaker for healthcare professionals, pointing to the engagement of proximal defenses specific to this work domain. Mortality threat mediates the association between death anxiety and job satisfaction only when supervisory support is low, pointing towards the crucial role of social support at work as a buffering mechanism against the deleterious effects of COVID-19 threat. Our paper presents one of the first empirical attempts to compare healthcare professionals with other workers with respect to job satisfaction and counterproductive work behaviors during the pandemic.
医疗保健专业人员是抗击 COVID-19 大流行的先锋，他们在这一大流行背景下，面临着与工作相关的重大挑战。我们对 253 名医疗保健专业人员和 189 名在其他领域工作的员工进行了调查，以探讨他们适应 COVID-19 的差异。我们的研究结果表明，与其他职业的受访者相比，医疗保健专业人员认为死亡威胁更高，工作满意度更低，从事的反生产工作行为更少。基于死亡管理理论的原则，我们表明，死亡焦虑的性格差异是感知与 COVID-19 相关的死亡威胁的主要驱动因素，但这种积极的关联对于医疗保健专业人员来说较弱，这表明针对这一工作领域的近端防御机制的参与。只有在监督支持较低的情况下，死亡威胁才会在死亡焦虑和工作满意度之间产生中介作用，这表明工作中的社会支持作为 COVID-19 威胁的有害影响的缓冲机制具有至关重要的作用。本文首次尝试在大流行期间将医疗保健专业人员与其他工作人员在工作满意度和反生产工作行为方面进行比较。
