Professional isolation and pandemic teleworkers’ satisfaction and commitment: The role of perceived organizational and supervisor support

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has abruptly and profoundly changed the way people interact with their organization, their colleagues and their supervisor.ObjectiveThis study assesses the effects of telework-induced professional isolation due to the pandemic. Drawing on organizational support theory, this study examines the relationship between professional isolation and satisfaction with the telework experience and affective organizational commitment during mandatory teleworking caused by the COVID-19 crisis. It does so by focusing on the moderating role of perceived organizational and supervisor support in these relations.MethodsData was collected via self-reported survey questionnaires from 728 pandemic teleworkers from various industry sectors in Quebec during the COVID-19 crisis. The study's hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM), and moderation effects were probed with the Johnson-Neyman technique.ResultsThe results reveal that professional isolation negatively affects satisfaction with the telework experience, but does not affect affective organizational commitment. The relationship between satisfaction with telework and professional isolation was moderated by perceived organizational support, and the relationship between affective organizational commitment and professional isolation was moderated by perceived supervisor support.ConclusionThis study expands the organizational support theory by examining perceived organizational and supervisor support during a crisis as a counterbalance to a challenging social and organizational climate that has led to professional isolation. The implications of the findings as well as future directions for research on professional isolation and telework are discussed.     

Anxiety-related differences in affective categorizations of lexical stimuli

Effects of emotional valence on attention have been shown to occur even when stimuli are presented outside awareness. The impact of negative valence on stimulus processing has been demonstrated to be particularly salient in anxiety. Therefore, it has been hypothesized that compared to nonanxious individuals, anxious individuals have an enhanced ability to detect the valence of negative stimuli. However, it remains unclear whether anxious individuals are better at identifying the valence of threatening stimuli or, rather, more likely to label ambiguous stimuli as threatening. To investigate these hypotheses, high and low anxious participants categorized lexical stimuli as "safe" or "dangerous." Stimuli were presented at durations that allowed for both conscious (unmasked) and nonconscious (masked) processing. Results show that on masked trials, anxious individuals evidenced an enhanced ability to correctly classify threatening information, whereas nonanxious participants demonstrated an enhanced ability to correctly classify neutral or positive information. Signal detection analyses indicated results were explained by a response bias, whereby anxious individuals were more likely than nonanxious individuals to categorize masked words as threatening and nonanxious individuals were more likely to categorize masked words as nonthreatening. No group differences for nonword stimuli emerged, suggesting that anxiety-related response bias tendencies are activated only after detection of a weak semantic signal.     

Where is the chocolate? Rapid spatial orienting toward stimuli associated with primary rewards

Some stimuli can orient attentional resources and access awareness even if they appear outside the focus of voluntary attention. Stimuli with low-level perceptual salience and stimuli with an emotional content can modulate attention independently of voluntary processes. In Experiment 1, we used a spatial cuing task to investigate whether stimuli that are controlled for their perceptual salience can modulate the rapid orienting of attention based exclusively on their affective relevance. Affective relevance was manipulated through a Pavlovian conditioning paradigm in which an arbitrary and affectively neutral perceptual stimulus was associated with a primary reward (i.e., a chocolate odor). Results revealed that, after conditioning, attentional resources were rapidly oriented toward the stimulus that was previously associated with the reward. In Experiment 2, we used the very same conditioning procedure, but we devaluated the reward after conditioning for half of the participants through a sensory-specific satiation procedure. Strikingly, when the reward was devaluated, attention was no longer oriented toward reward-associated stimuli. Our findings therefore suggest that reward associations rapidly modulate visual processing independently of both voluntary processing and the perceptual salience of the stimulus. This supports the notion that stimuli associated with primary rewards modulate rapid attention orienting on the basis of the affective relevance of the stimulus.