The virus made me lose control: The impact of COVID-related work changes on employees’ mental health, aggression, and interpersonal conflict

Abstract

Introduction: COVID-related work changes have seriously disrupted employees’ familiar routines and hampered their lives and work. Although this topic has drawn rising attention, to our knowledge, limited studies have investigated the impact of COVID-related work changes on employees’ mentality and behavior. In this paper, we developed a moderated mediation model based on ego depletion theory to test how and when COVID-related work changes impact employees’ mental health, interpersonal conflict, and aggression behavior. Methods: We collected 536 valid participants by conducting a questionnaire survey in a large Chinese manufacturing company, and tested our proposed theoretical model and hypotheses using SPSS 26.0 and Mplus 8.1. Results: The empirical results showed that COVID-related work changes would harm employees’ mental health and boost their interpersonal conflict and aggression via increasing their ego depletion. Moreover, trait resilience has an intervention in the relationship between COVID-related work changes and employees’ ego depletion, which weakens the indirect impact of COVID-related work changes on mental health, interpersonal conflict, and aggression. Discussion: These findings suggest that although COVID-related work changes were inevitable, managers should take measures to improve the employees’ mental status and avoid conflicts promptly while taking steps to keep organizations on track.