The COVID-19 impact on employee performance and satisfaction: a moderated moderated-mediation conditional model of job crafting and employee engagement

Human Resource Development (HRD) is indispensable for the success of any organization; educational institutions are not an exception. The unprecedented outbreak of COVID-19 brought a paradigmatic shift in educational work cultures from supporting primarily face-to-face teaching to online teaching. The global pandemic posed substantial, unique challenges for HRD professionals in educational institutions as they sought to best manage the sudden change. Drawing from the HRD literature we found two promising research variables, job crafting and employee engagement that could help mitigate the ill effects of COVID-19 on performance and satisfaction in higher educational institutions. Based on the Job Crafting Theory (JCT) and Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) theoretical frameworks, we developed a conceptual model and examined the relationships among COVID-19 Impact, employee job performance, and satisfaction. We used a carefully crafted survey instrument and collected data from 640 faculty members working in educational institutions. After checking the instrument's psychometric properties using the LISREL software of structural equation modelling, we used Hayes's PROCESS for testing the hypothesized relationships. The results indicate that COVID-19 Impact is negatively related to job performance and satisfaction. However, the results also support that performance is a mediator in the relationship between COVID-19 Impact and satisfaction. Further, job crafting acted as a moderator in reducing the negative effect of COVID-19 on performance. Perhaps most importantly, employee engagement (second moderator) moderates the moderated-mediation relationship between job crafting (first moderator) and COVID-19 Impact on satisfaction, mediated through employee performance. Overall, the study results reveal that the three-way interaction between COVID-19 Impact, job crafting, and employee engagement on employee performance provides a novel way of explaining the complex relationships in minimizing the adverse effects of the global pandemic. The implications for HRD theory and practice are discussed.