Collective Responsibility in the Workplace and its Effects on COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance Among Employees: The Role of Strategic Internal Communication

Abstract

Businesses, as one of the largest units in society, are expected to be socially responsible and become vaccine advocate to help with recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Building upon this expectation, this study takes an internal communication perspective to explore the role of organizations in motivating employees to stand in solidarity and adopt prosocial behavior (i.e., vaccination against COVID-19 in this study) in the fight against the pandemic. Specifically, we propose a psychological model that pictures how organizational informing and listening can facilitate employee attitude toward vaccination by realizing their collective responsibility to protect others at work via communal relationships with the organizations. The findings of this study contribute to ethical practices of organizational communication by revealing the under-explored role of organizations in addressing vaccine hesitance and resistance during the current pandemic.