Flattening the Latent Growth Curve? Explaining Within-Person Changes in Employee Well-Being during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic represents one of the greatest global crises in modern history. In addition to recession and high unemployment, agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warn that stressors associated with a pandemic can cause increased strains, including difficulty concentrating, anxiety, and decreased mental health (CDC, 2020). Two general frameworks that explain these stressor-strain relationships over time include stress-reaction and adaptation models. Stress-reaction models suggest that stressors, such as heightened job demands due to the pandemic, accumulate over time and thus prolonged exposure to these stressors results in both immediate and long-term strain; conversely, adaptation models suggest that people adapt to stressors over time, such that strains produced by ongoing stressors tend to dissipate. After controlling for county-level COVID-19 cases, we found that (a) workers in general exhibited decreasing cognitive weariness and psychological symptoms over time, providing support for the adaptation model; (b) on-site workers experienced increasing physical fatigue over time, supporting the stress-reaction model among those workers; and (c) engaging in recovery behaviors was associated with improvements in cognitive weariness and psychological symptoms for all workers. We also found that our Time 1 outcomes were significantly different than pre-pandemic norms, such that our participants displayed lower initial levels of job-related burnout and higher initial levels of psychological symptoms than pre-pandemic norms. Furthermore, supplemental qualitative data support our quantitative findings for recovery behaviors. These findings have important implications for understanding workers’ responses to the pandemic and they can help inform organizational practice.