The Power of Negative Affect during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Negative Affect Leverages Need Satisfaction to Foster Work Centrality

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has created unprecedented disruptions in organizations and people’s lives by generating uncertainty, anxiety, and isolation for most employees around the globe. Such disruptive context may have prompted employees to reconsider their identification with their work role, defined as work centrality. As such reconsideration may have deep implications, we reasoned that individuals’ affective dispositions would influence work centrality across time during the pandemic. Drawing upon the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions and the met expectations underpinnings of negative affectivity, we predicted that positive and negative affect would foster, albeit for different reasons, work centrality. Based on self-determination theory, we further expected the fulfilment of the needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competence to enhance the effect of positive and negative affectivity. Based on a three-wave study (N = 379) conducted during the COVID-19 lockdown followed by a reopening of the economy in Canada (i.e., May to July 2020), we found negative affectivity, but not positive affectivity, to drive work centrality over time, and found this effect to be enhanced at high levels of the satisfaction of the needs for autonomy and relatedness. The implications of these results for our understanding of the role of trait affectivity in times of crisis are discussed.