Compassion During Difficult Times: Team Compassion Behavior, Suffering, Supervisory Dependence, and Employee Voice During COVID-19

We draw from conservation of resources theory to examine how employees' assessments of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) event strength may threaten their existing resources and their subsequent dependence on their supervisors, as well as voice behaviors that are critical to the organization's survival in a disruptive environment. We propose that assessments of COVID-19 as a strong event are positively related to employees' suffering, in turn increasing their sense of dependence on their supervisors and ultimately reducing their tendencies to display promotive and prohibitive voice. Furthermore, we propose that team compassion behavior can mitigate these negative indirect effects of COVID-19 event strength on employee voice by attenuating the positive effect of COVID-19 event strength on individual suffering. We designed a six-wave, multisource, time-lagged field study in a hotel chain based in a Southeast Asian country to capture employees' and supervisors' perceptions and behaviors before the onset of the pandemic (T1) and then following the country's COVID-19 mandatory stay-at-home order (T2-T6). Our results highlight the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on employee-supervisor relationships, and the critical role of team compassion behavior as a contextual moderator to reduce the indirect negative effect of COVID-19 event strength on employee voice.