Pre-crisis commitment human resource management and employees' attitudes in a global pandemic: The role of trust in the government

Studies of human resource management (HRM) have produced plentiful results on commitment HRM, but its effects during a crisis have rarely been examined. Incorporating the commitment HRM view and the cognitive phenomenological framework, we examined whether and how commitment HRM practices implemented prior to the COVID-19 mitigate employees' negative cognitive evaluations and attitudes during the pandemic. Moreover, a pandemic is a situation that requires strong government interventions, and we further examined whether employees' trust in the government would play a moderating role in explaining the effects of commitment HRM. With a multilevel framework, we measured commitment HRM via an analysis of big data provided online prior to the pandemic and matched the information to employees' responses collected from a survey after the outbreak of the pandemic. With data from 1010 employees and 52 companies, we found that employees in organizations with a higher utilization of commitment HRM showed less threat appraisals. Moreover, those experiencing fewer threat appraisals showed more commitment to their organizations. In addition, we found that the negative link between a company's commitment HRM and its employees' threat appraisals was pronounced when they had a lower level of trust in the government. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.