Moving on: Exploring the implications of leader departure and incoming temporary leaders for collective turnover and unit performance.

While leader departures from work units frequently occur within organizations and are assumed to negatively impact unit functioning, the collective reaction to a leader departure event can vary across time. While a common expectation of leader departure models is that the incoming leader is permanent, it is unclear how unit-level reactions, such as collective turnover and unit performance, might change over time in response to a departure event when the departing leader is replaced with a temporary leader. We draw on context emergent turnover (CET) theory and literature on leader departures to develop and empirically test specific hypotheses exploring relationships among leader departures, collective turnover, and unit performance over time. In addition, we examine the extent to which these relationships are influenced by the temporary status of the incoming leader. Using discontinuous growth models, we examine a longitudinal data set from 324 units within a large Latin American operation of a global direct sales company (N = 3,082 performance periods). Findings indicate that, after a leader departs, there is an immediate increase in collective turnover and that unit performance decreases over time. Further, when the incoming leader is temporary, unit performance increases briefly, but the rate of performance drops over time. Overall, our research offers insights with regard to how leader departures impact unit outcomes, as well as how long such effects last. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

When helping hurts: COVID-19 critical incident involvement and resource depletion in health care workers.

A focus on helping others is generally lauded, particularly in medicine, but in the context of a pandemic when health care professionals are facing increased risk, loss, and trauma, this focus can potentially be detrimental. In this study, we sought to (a) examine if health care workers intensely involved in the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic are experiencing negative psychological and emotional outcomes, and (b) investigate if helping related factors (prosocial motivation and perceived prosocial impact) exacerbate and mitigate relationships to negative outcomes in a crisis situation. Using data collected from doctors and nurses before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, we examine the relationship between intensity of involvement in the COVID-19 pandemic response and emotional exhaustion and depression, as well as the moderating effects of prosocial motivation and perceived prosocial impact. Data was collected at three time points (T1 and T2 prepandemic, and T3 during COVID-19), with prosocial motivation and controls collected at T1/T2 and predictors and outcomes collected during the pandemic. We find that intensity of involvement does associate with emotional exhaustion at work and that higher prosocial motivation exacerbates this relationship. Supplemental analyses suggest that the exposure to self-dimension of involvement is positively associated with emotional exhaustion and depression. Understanding the roles of prosocial motivation and prosocial impact in managing regulatory resources has important ramifications for health care workers on the frontlines of health crises responses, as these resources are necessary to manage the associated trauma. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).