Twenty-second International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated “Stay-Home” restrictions in the United States have disrupted employees’ lives. We leverage the change brought on by the Stay-Home restrictions to examine corresponding changes in employees’ commitment to their workgroup and the reasons for those changes. Specifically, we advance and test a model predicting that the Stay-Home restrictions prevented engagement in rigidly-performed, meaningful workplace activities (i.e., ritualistic workplace activities), which subsequently made workgroups feel less cohesive and ultimately reduced members’ workgroup commitment. Moreover, we compare changes in workgroup commitment to changes in workgroup identification, hypothesizing that commitment to one’s group, more so than identification with one’s group, erodes when workgroups feel less cohesive. We test our model in a four-wave panel survey of 1,000 U.S. employees (772 of whom qualified for the study) at the onset of the Stay-Home restrictions, which allows us to examine within-person changes to commitment over time. Consistent with our hypotheses, commitment decreased with the duration of Stay-Home restrictions, which was statistically mediated by corresponding declines in engaging in ritualistic workplace activities and beliefs that the workgroup was cohesive. Moreover, commitment to one’s workgroup declined more than did identification with the workgroup, due to the stronger relationship between perceived cohesion and commitment (vs. identification). These results replicated in a separate, preregistered cross-sectional survey. These findings shed light on the mechanisms of workgroup commitment, demonstrating that engagement in ritualistic activities, through enhanced workgroup cohesion, is particularly linked to stronger commitment—more so than identification—over time.