Numbing Effect of Emotional Exhaustion on COVID-19 Fear and Contrasting Effect on 
Job Satisfaction and Quality of Work Life 
Among Indian Healthcare Workers

Abstract

The study conceptualises COVID-19 fear among healthcare workers as a job resource (meaningfulness of work) and job demand (physical and emotional demands), while exploring its effect on healthcare workers’ job satisfaction and quality of work life. The potential numbing effect of emotional exhaustion on COVID-19 fear is studied in the proposed framework. Data were collected from 202 Indian healthcare workers using standardised scales and analysed using Smart PLS 2.0. The results indicate that COVID-19 fear has a significant positive relationship with job satisfaction and a significant negative association with quality of work. The study results validate the hypotheses that COVID-19 fear simultaneously acts as a job resource and job demand. COVID-19 fear had an indirect, negative effect on job satisfaction via reduced quality of work. Emotional exhaustion in healthcare workers reduced healthcare workers’ COVID-19 fears, suggesting a numbing effect of emotional exhaustion on the arousal of emotions. The study is among the first, to the best of our knowledge, that identify the same factor (COVID-19 fear) as both a job resource as well as a job demand for an occupational group (healthcare workers). The ability of COVID-19 fear to simultaneously increase the meaningfulness of the job for healthcare workers and reduce their quality of work life suggests that healthcare administrators need to espouse policies that simultaneously enable healthcare workers to perceive strong emotions that make the meaning of their job salient and buffer them from the emotional, cognitive and physical demands consequences.