Distressed and Distracted by COVID-19 During High-Stakes Virtual Interviews: The Role of Job Interview Anxiety on Performance and Reactions

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: McCarthy, Julie M.; Truxillo, Donald M.; Bauer, Talya N.; Erdogan, Berrin; Shao, Yiduo; Wang, Mo; Liff, Joshua; Gardner, Cari
• 署名单位: University of Toronto; University Toronto Scarborough; University of Limerick; Portland State University; University of Exeter; State University System of Florida; University of Florida
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF APPLIED PSYCHOLOGY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0021-9010
• DOI: 10.1037/apl0000943
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 1103-1117
• 关键词: covid-19; ANXIETY; exhaustion; virtual interviews; interview performance

摘要

Employers have increasingly turned to virtual interviews to facilitate online, socially distanced selection processes in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there is little understanding about the experience of job candidates in these virtual interview contexts. We draw fromEvent System Theory (Morgeson et al., 2015) to advance and test a conceptual model that focuses on a high-stress, high-stakes setting and integrates literatures on workplace stress with literatures on applicant reactions. We predict that when applicants ruminate about COVID-19 during an interview and have higher levels of COVID-19 exhaustion, they will have higher levels of anxiety during virtual interviews, which in turn relates to reduced interview performance, lower perceptions of fairness, and reduced intentions to recommend the organization. Further, we predict that three factors capturing COVID-19 as an enduring and impactful event (COVID-19 duration, COVID-19 cases, COVID-19 deaths) will be positively related to COVID-19 exhaustion. We tested our propositions with 8,343 job applicants across 373 companies and 93 countries/regions. Consistent with predictions, we found a positive relationship between COVID-19 rumination and interview anxiety, and this relationship was stronger for applicants who experienced higher (vs. lower) levels of COVID-19 exhaustion. In turn, interview anxiety was negatively related to interview performance, fairness perceptions, and recommendation intentions. Moreover, using a relevant subset of the data (n = 6,136), we found that COVID-19 duration and deaths were positively related to COVID-19 exhaustion. This research offers several insights for understanding the virtual interview experience embedded in the pandemic and advances the literature on applicant reactions.