Abstract:

Covid-19 put severe pressure on human resources in several sectors, including higher education. During the lockdown, universities were forced to go online, and academics started working from home. This new environment might have impacted academics’ motivation and, subsequently, their turnover intention and intention to remain in their universities. Guided by the affective events theory, we aimed to examine these longitudinal effects. We collected data from academics in Malaysia at three time points, namely the beginning of the lockdown (April), the end of the lockdown (June), and two months after the lockdown (August) in 2020. In addition, we considered previous higher education experience, age, and academic rank as time-invariant covariates in our model and applied latent growth curve modeling to analyze the data. For this purpose, we used the EQS 6.4 statistical package.

Our analysis revealed that:
1) academic motivation’s initial mean significantly decreased over time,
2) academic motivation’s longitudinal effects on turnover intention and intention to remain were significant, and
3) there were positive effects running from academic rank and age to academic motivation.

We further provided insights on the implemented policies’ effectiveness to maintain academics’ level of motivation during the Covid-19 pandemic. Notably, our research is among the limited number of longitudinal studies examining the relationships between employees’ attitudes and behaviors during the unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic.

Keywords:

Human resources in academic organizations, Academic motivation, Intention to remain, Turnover intention, Latent growth curve (LGC) modeling, Covid-19 lockdown.