Pre‐crisis commitment human resource management and employees' attitudes in a global pandemic: The role of trust in the government

Abstract Studies of human resource management (HRM) have produced plentiful results on commitment HRM, but its effects during a crisis have rarely been examined. Incorporating the commitment HRM view and the cognitive phenomenological framework, we examined whether and how commitment HRM practices implemented prior to the COVID‐19 mitigate employees' negative cognitive evaluations and attitudes during the pandemic. Moreover, a pandemic is a situation that requires strong government interventions, and we further examined whether employees' trust in the government would play a moderating role in explaining the effects of commitment HRM. With a multilevel framework, we measured commitment HRM via an analysis of big data provided online prior to the pandemic and matched the information to employees' responses collected from a survey after the outbreak of the pandemic. With data from 1010 employees and 52 companies, we found that employees in organizations with a higher utilization of commitment HRM showed less threat appraisals. Moreover, those experiencing fewer threat appraisals showed more commitment to their organizations. In addition, we found that the negative link between a company's commitment HRM and its employees' threat appraisals was pronounced when they had a lower level of trust in the government. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.