Employee Motivation in the Event of Unexpected Change : The roles of time and uncertainty in employees’ adaptability to change

Sammanfattning: The Covid-19 pandemic has made a major impact on organizations around the world since the outburst at the beginning of 2020. This has led the organization to let their employees work remotely from home. This situation has brought challenges for the employees which in turn have been forced to adapt to a new working environment. The uncertainty of the event may impact employee motivation. is to construct a model of not yet linked theoretical understandings that supports a simulation of potential future outcomes. Specifically, this paper draws a link between current understandings of employee motivation, employees’ adaptability to change. In order to simulate the current situation of the Covid-19 pandemic, this paper invites the notion of time and uncertainty into the equation. This to be able to demonstrate and understand how a new phenomenon can affect employees' motivation when they work from home for an extended period. The model proposes time as a non-self-healing process that instead risks impairing motivation if (a) self-regulatory activities are supporting the current motivation, and/or (b) the employee denies the change. In other words, there is no indication that the old saying 'time heals all wounds' fits in this context. In addition, the model indicates that the uncertainties derived from unexpected events drive employee's individual restraining forces. This paper contributes to the existing literature on employee motivation which previously lacked a framework for how motivation can be affected through unexpected change and extended work from home. This framework can also be used for future research where it will benefit from empirical data to further strengthen or develop the model.