Using machine learning to investigate the public’s emotional responses to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Abstract

According to event system theory (Morgeson et al., 2015), the COVID-19 pandemic and resultant stay-at-home orders are novel, critical, and disruptive events at the environmental level that substantially changed people's work, such as where they work, how they interact with colleagues, and so forth. Although many studies have examined events' impact on features or behaviors, few studies have examined how events impact aggregate emotions and how these effects may unfold over time. Applying a state-of-the-art deep learning technique (i.e., fine-tuned BERT algorithm), the current study extracted the public's daily emotion associated with working from home (WFH) at the U.S. state-level over four months (March 01, 2020-July 01, 2020) from 1.56 million Tweets. We then applied discontinuous growth modeling (DGM) to investigate how COVID-19 and resultant stay-at-home orders changed the trajectories of the public's emotions associated with WFH. Our results indicated that stay-at-home orders demonstrated both immediate (i.e., intercept change) and longitudinal (i.e., slope change) effects on the public's emotion trajectories. Daily new COVID-19 case counts did not significantly change the emotion trajectories. We discuss theoretical implications for testing event system theory with the global pandemic and practical implications. We also make Python and R codes for fine-tuning BERT models and DGM analyses open-source so that future researchers can verify our findings or adapt and apply the codes in their own studies.

The Impact of Enforced Working from Home on Employee Job Satisfaction during COVID-19: An Event System Perspective

“…Depending on their source, events are categorized as reactive (if entities are forced to accept their occurrence) or proactive (if entities actively create them) [ 46 ]. As strong environmental events are more likely to alter behaviours [ 47 ], EST is typically used to determine the impact of reactive events on organizational outcomes, such as team knowledge absorption [ 48 ], team leadership [ 49 ] and organizational evolution [ 50 ]. Research on the individual-level mostly focuses on the impact of the strength of the COVID-19 event on individual innovation behaviour [ 51 ], job search behaviour [ 52 ], public emotional response [ 47 ], employees’ sense of job insecurity [ 53 ] and vaccination intention [ 54 ], but there is still a lack of studies on EJS during the COVID-19 pandemic based on EST.…”

“…As strong environmental events are more likely to alter behaviours [ 47 ], EST is typically used to determine the impact of reactive events on organizational outcomes, such as team knowledge absorption [ 48 ], team leadership [ 49 ] and organizational evolution [ 50 ]. Research on the individual-level mostly focuses on the impact of the strength of the COVID-19 event on individual innovation behaviour [ 51 ], job search behaviour [ 52 ], public emotional response [ 47 ], employees’ sense of job insecurity [ 53 ] and vaccination intention [ 54 ], but there is still a lack of studies on EJS during the COVID-19 pandemic based on EST. Among the few studies applying EST to proactive events, Lu et al [ 55 ] explored the impact of tourism development on urban economies, and Hu et al [ 56 ] investigated which attributes of enterprise safety training programmes promote employee safety behaviours.…”

Researching employee experiences and behavior in times of crisis: Theoretical and methodological considerations and implications for human resource management

“…Researchers are also encouraged to consider novel and eclectic data sources in studying crises, which may be facilitated by using technologies that enable data capture from large, publicly available online sources. For example, Min et al (2021) used web scraping to collect over 1.5 million tweets that reflect people's emotional reactions to work from home orders during COVID-19, and applied discontinuous growth modeling to investigate how stay-at-home orders changed the trajectories of emotional responses to working from home.…”

Organizational Behaviour in the COVID‐19 Context: Effects of Supervisor‐Directed Deviance on Retaliation against Subordinates

“…Further, the AET posits that events do not trigger emotions in a vacuum; the environment also influences individuals’ emotional reactions to affective events (Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996). Thus, the pandemic may constitute a wider exogenous affective event (see Min et al ., 2021) that can punctuate context (Johns, 2006), shaping supervisors’ experience and responses to deviance.…”