The Power of Family Support: The Long-Term Effect of Pre-COVID-19 Family Support on Mid-COVID-19 Work Outcomes

While COVID-19 has triggered a vast amount of research on the effect of the pandemic on employee outcomes, little information is known about how the family-to-work interface affects long-term work outcomes during the pandemic. Drawing on the work–home resources model, this study proposes that family support provided before the onset of COVID-19 has a positive indirect effect on job performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) after the onset, by decreasing emotional exhaustion. To test this proposition, we collected two-wave data from 211 South Korean employees over a 17-month period. As predicted, after controlling for employees’ pre-COVID-19 emotional exhaustion, job performance, and OCB, pre-COVID-19 family support was found to exert a significant indirect effect on mid-COVID-19 job performance (b = 0.024, 95% CI = [0.003, 0.071], ab(cs) = 0.027) and OCB (b = 0.031, 95% CI = [0.001, 0.084], ab(cs) = 0.033), through mid-COVID-19 emotional exhaustion. This finding suggests that family support has a positive longitudinal effect on work outcomes for employees during the pandemic.