Resource integration and dynamic capability of frontline employee during COVID-19 pandemic: From value creation and engineering management perspectives

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2021.121446Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between frontline employee adaptability and organization performance during COVID-19 pandemic.

  • This study examines the relationship from technological, emotional, and psychological perspectives.

  • With the help of dynamic capability view and different adaptability theories, a theoretical model has been developed conceptually.

Abstract

The cornerstone of any successful organizations is the frontline employees. Frontline employees (FLEs) are always in action at the frontline of the business. They do not operate from the office space or from the corporate setting. Frontline employees directly interact with their customers. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many frontline employees experienced numerous challenges as most of the places there were full or partial lockdown imposed by the government agencies and the frontline employees could not be able to directly connect with their customers. Not many studies are there which investigated the issue of resource integration, dynamic capabilities, and engineering management abilities of the frontline employees such as technological capability, emotional intelligence, and psychological capability which perceived to influence the frontline employee adaptability and organization performance. In this background, the purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between frontline employee adaptability and organization performance during COVID-19 pandemic from technological, emotional, and psychological perspectives. With the help of dynamic capability view and different adaptability theories, a theoretical model has been developed conceptually. Later the conceptual model has been validated using partial least square – structural equation modeling technique considering 412 respondents from frontline employees of different organizations in Asia and EMEA. The study found that frontline employees’ dynamic capabilities and engineering management abilities significantly and positively impact employee adaptability which in turn impact the performance of the organization mediating through employee job satisfaction and employee performance.

Keywords

Dynamic capability
Frontline employee adaptability
Organization performance
COVID-19
Turbulent situation
Resource integration
Engineering management ability

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Dr. Sheshadri Chatterjee is a post-doctoral research scholar at Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India. He has completed PhD from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. He is having work experience in different multinational organizations such as Microsoft Corporation, Hewlett Packard Company, IBM and so on. Sheshadri has published research articles in several reputed journals such as Government Information Quarterly, Information Technology & People, Journal of Digital Policy, Regulation and Governance, Enterprise information System and so on. Sheshadri is also a certified project management professional, PMP from Project Management Institute (PMI), USA and completed PRINCE2, OGC, UK and ITIL v3 UK.

Dr. Ranjan Chaudhari is an Assosiate Professor at Department of Marketing, National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Mumbai, India.

Dr. Vanessa Izquierdo González has been the General Director of Sagardoy Business & Law School since January 2020. For more than 20 years, she was the academic director of Centro de Estudios Garrigues. She studied Law at Deusto University. She is Master in Human Resources at Garrigues, MBA at IESE, and Ph.D. at the Information Sciences Faculty of the Complutense University of Madrid. Actually, she combines her professional and teaching activity with academic research.

Dr. Ajay Kumar is an Assistant Professor at the AIM Research Center on Artificial Intelligence in Value Creation, EMLYON Business School, France. Ajay's expertise lies in helping companies leverage data-science, machine learning, AI and business analytics for competitive advantage and to understand of how consumers, firms, industries and societies are being reshaped by the big-data and business analytics revolution. His-research and teaching interests are in data and text mining, decision support systems, knowledge management, business intelligence and enterprise modeling.

Dr. Sanjay Kumar Singh is an assistant professor at Maynooth University, Maynooth, Ireland. He is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Business Research, Consulting Editor of Journal of International Management, Reviewing Editor of the Asia Pacific Journal of Management and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Asia Business Studies.

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