Death anxiety, job satisfaction and counterproductive work behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic: a comparative study of healthcare and non-healthcare professionals

Healthcare professionals are the vanguard of battling the COVID-19 pandemic and they experience major challenges associated with their jobs in the context of this pandemic. We carried out a survey of 253 healthcare professionals and 189 employees working in other domains to explore differences in how they adapted to COVID-19. Our results show that healthcare professionals perceive a higher mortality threat, lower job satisfaction and engage in fewer counterproductive work behaviors compared to respondents from other professions. Building on the tenets of the Terror Management Theory, we show that dispositional differences in death anxiety are the main drivers of perceived mortality threat in relation to COVID-19, yet this positive association is weaker for healthcare professionals, pointing to the engagement of proximal defenses specific to this work domain. Mortality threat mediates the association between death anxiety and job satisfaction only when supervisory support is low, pointing towards the crucial role of social support at work as a buffering mechanism against the deleterious effects of COVID-19 threat. Our paper presents one of the first empirical attempts to compare healthcare professionals with other workers with respect to job satisfaction and counterproductive work behaviors during the pandemic.