Published on: July 8, 2025 at 9:47 pm
Go-getters who are high performers but don’t feel valued by their organization tend to flee for greener pastures. For example, many essential workers such as hospital personnel and other healthcare employees did so much during the COVID-19 pandemic are asking themselves, “What is my organization doing for me?”
Academy of Management Scholar Jaqueline “Jackie” Coyle-Shapiro of California State University, San Bernardino, and the London School of Economics said that the employees who put their health at risk to help their organizations survive the pandemic are now thinking that they deserve to be rewarded for what they’ve done.
“The pandemic really brought to the fore this notion of reciprocity, employees managing to work through the pandemic to ensure that the organization delivers its product and services,” Coyle-Shapiro said. “Now that the pandemic essentially petered out, employees are thinking the organization has an obligation to pay them back for what they sacrificed during the pandemic.
“We’re in a period of potential change, primarily because employees are now thinking, ‘Maybe I should be working in a different organization that looks after their employees,’” she said. “Organizations are under increasing pressure to prioritize the psychological and physical health of employees.
“That’s increasingly becoming a larger issue for organizations, and this is something the pandemic highlighted, when people were dying.”
Even before the pandemic, good organizational leaders realized that employees’ health is their responsibility.
“Now, post-pandemic, organizations are under increasing pressure to shoulder more of that responsibility for employees’ psychological and physical health,” Coyle-Shapiro said.
