An island of sanity during COVID-19 pandemic: Does pet attachment support buffer employees' stress due to job insecurity?

Drawing on the transactional theory of stress, the current study investigates whether employee job insecurity triggers employee behavioral strain reactions (i.e., alcohol use, marijuana use, and cigarette use) and psychological strain reactions (i.e., emotional exhaustion and depression) through stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, we integrate social support theory and expect the moderating role of pet attachment support in the above relationships. By collecting two-wave data from 187 employees with pets in the United States, we found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, stress mediated the relationships between job insecurity and predicted behavioral and psychological reactions. Moreover, pet attachment support buffered the relationships between stress and these behavioral and psychological strain reactions (all except cigarette use). Pet attachment support also alleviated the conditional indirect effects job insecurity had on the two types of strain reactions via stress. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of this study.

Interruptions in Remote Work: a Resource-based Model of Work and Family Stress

We use the conservation of resources (COR) theory to propose a work-family model of stress in remote work. We propose that interruptions from family are a unique hindrance stressor, detrimental for the employee's challenge and hindrance stress responses in remote work, which, in turn, have distinct effects on resource-oriented attitudes and states of both the employee and spouse. Namely, we expect that both partners' satisfaction with the work arrangement, employee engagement, and spouse family overload will be associated with the way the employee experiences stress in remote work (stress response). We also integrate the effort-recovery model to examine whether two types of breaks taken by employees while working remotely replenish resources lost through interruptions. Using a sample of 391 couples, we find support for all hypotheses that pertain to the employee. Findings involving the spouse support the primacy of the resource loss tenet in COR theory, in that these detrimental effects are significant in crossing over to the spouse via hindrance but are not significant via challenge stress. We discuss the implications of these findings, emphasizing that interruptions are harmful for both types of stress experienced by remote employees (i.e., lower "good" and higher "bad" stress responses), and interruptions appear to have far-reaching effects on both partners. However, choosing to use breaks for both nonwork goals and self-care can buffer these otherwise detrimental effects.