Impact of COVID-19 outbreak on employee performance – Moderating role of industry 4.0 base technologies

COVID-19 outbreak has implied significant changes in the way service organizations work, affecting employees' routine and activities. At the same time, the advent of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) introduced new technologies that might facilitate such activities, mitigating the COVID-19's implications. The objective of this research is two-fold. First, we aim at examining the impact of COVID-19's work implications on employees' performance (i.e. output quality and delivery). Second, we seek to verify the moderating role of I4.0 base technologies on this relationship. We surveyed 106 employees of different service organizations who have been working remotely during the pandemic and analyzed their responses through multivariate techniques. Results revealed that COVID-19's work implications (i.e. home office work environment, job insecurity and virtual connection) do impact employee's performance, although not at the same extent. Further, we found that I4.0 technologies moderate the enhancement of employee's performance. However, the orientation and intensity of such moderation may vary according to the performance metric and work implication under analysis. As COVID-19 outbreak inevitably pushed new ways of working that can become an integral part of the post-pandemic world, our research provides important theoretical and practical implications for improving employee's performance through the digitalization of service organizations.