Employees’ health & well-being during COVID-19 pandemic: the role of leadership

Abstract

COVID-19 brought many challenges for employers, among the challenges include - a critical disruption in the supply and demand chain which has significantly affected the employees’ job engagement and organizational performance. The world in year 2020 up until the end of this research study in January 2022 had been dominated by the impact of the novel coronavirus known as COVID-19. This study seeked to examine employees’ health, well-being and its impact from COVID-19 pandemic. Main research objectives of this study included: i) to study employees’ health and well-being in the organization, ii) to explore the impact of COVID-19 on employees’ health and well-being, iii) to propose intervention and measure its improvement on employees’ health and well-being; and, iv) to provide recommendations to company to improve employees’ health and well-being. For this explanatory research, the data was collected from 20 employees through a cross sectional quantitative survey research supported by a qualitative interview. In terms of data analysis, SPSS software was used to analyze the quantitative data which were collected from the 20 participants, while NVivo software was utilized to analyze the text data collected from interview. The data collected were then analyzed and evaluated its findings. From the data collected, it was found that the COVID-19 pandemic has indeed hit the organization whereby employees’ health and well-being were affected and there were numerous challenges that impacted the organization while adapting the necessary external and internal environmental changes. The intervention in action research cycle one by implementing supportive leadership and intervention in action research cycle two were both proven effective in this research.