You Don’t Care for me, So What’s the Point for me to Care for Your Business? Negative Implications of Felt Neglect by the Employer for Employee Work Meaning and Citizenship Behaviors Amid the COVID-19 Pandemic

Employees’ felt neglect by their employer signals to them that their employer violates ethics of care, and thus, it diminishes employee perceptions of work meaning. Drawing upon work meaning theory, we adopt a relationship-based perspective of felt neglect and its downstream outcome— reduction in organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) amid the COVID-19 pandemic. We propose and test a core relational mechanism— relatedness need frustration (RNF)—that transmits the effect of felt neglect onto work meaning. A four-wave survey study of 111 working employees in the USA demonstrated that employees’ felt neglect had negative implications for their work meaning and subsequent OCB due to their RNF. Our findings contribute to research on ethics of care and work meaning theory and stress the importance of work meaning amid crises. In addition, our findings suggest steps that employers can take to mitigate employees’ felt neglect (a violation of ethics of care) and its negative ramifications.