The Faculty of Business invites members of the campus community--students, faculty and staff--to attend a virtual research presentation by Steve Granger for a tenure-track assistant professor of management position with a focus on human resource management (HRM). 

Candidate's Bio:

Steve Granger is a PhD candidate in organizational behaviour and human resources at the Haskayne School of Business, University of Calgary. He conducts research from a psychological perspective in the core areas of occupational health, gig work, and individual differences. His work has been published in various outlets, including the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Human Relations, Personality and Social Psychology Review, Journal of Safety Research, and Organizational Dynamics. He has also taught multiple courses in organizational behaviour and serves as an editorial board member for Human Relations.

Presentation Title: The Impact of COVID-19 on Professional Gig Workers: Identifying Challenges and Psychosocial Resources for Resilience

Abstract:

Scholarship on stress and resilience at work has repeatedly overlooked professional gig workers despite the rapid growth of this independent workforce. Studying such workers, especially under conditions of global disruption, offers an opportunity to expand theory on the role of personal resources in promoting resilience and well-being in the absence of contextual resources traditionally offered by organizations. Drawing on the conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989) and using unique qualitative and quantitative data gathered prior to and during the COVID-19 global pandemic, we investigate the pandemic’s impact on an international sample of professional gig workers and test the relationship between psychosocial resources and workers’ resilience. Results suggest that workers experienced the pandemic as an environmental jolt (Meyer, 1982), which affected their working lives through shrinking gig work availability, and greater challenges with fluctuating emotions, organizing day-to-day work, and maintaining relationships. Further, we examined the role that pre-pandemic levels of two theoretically informed personal resources—work meaningfulness and the emotional carrying capacity of these workers’ networks—and find that work meaningfulness is associated with cognitive and affective well-being, and emotional carrying capacity is associated with social and affective well-being, as well as psychological resilience. Taken together, this research provides novel insights into professional gig workers’ resilience and well-being during the pandemic and contributes to our understanding of gig workers’ experiences of environmental jolts.

The presentation will take place on April 1, 2:00--3:00 pm (Atlantic Time) via the following Zoom link:  

https://upei.zoom.us/j/68210211032?pwd=ZjIwelE4UE04dmlZck81WWJ4TXY0UT09

Meeting ID: 682 1021 1032

Passcode: 070531

For further information, please contact Shelly Kavanagh at businessfac@upei.ca.