Worrying About Finances During COVID-19: Resiliency Enhances the Effect of Worrying on Both Proactive Behavior and Stress

Naomi M Fa-Kaji; Elisabeth R Silver; Mikki R Hebl; Danielle D King; Eden B King; Abby Corrington; Isabel Bilotta

doi:10.1007/s41542-022-00130-y

Worrying About Finances During COVID-19: Resiliency Enhances the Effect of Worrying on Both Proactive Behavior and Stress

Occup Health Sci. 2023;7(1):111-142. doi: 10.1007/s41542-022-00130-y. Epub 2022 Dec 3.

Authors

Naomi M Fa-Kaji^#¹, Elisabeth R Silver^#¹, Mikki R Hebl^#¹, Danielle D King^#¹, Eden B King^#¹, Abby Corrington², Isabel Bilotta¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychological Sciences, Rice University, 6100 Main St., Houston, TX 77005 USA.
² Department of Management, Providence College School of Business, Providence, RI USA.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting economic instability, many people are contending with financial insecurity. Guided by Conservation of Resources Theory (Hobfoll, American Psychologist 44:513-524, 1989; Hobfoll et al., Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior 5:103-128, 2018), the current research explores the consequences of experiencing financial insecurity during a pandemic, with a focus on individuals who report relatively higher rates of financial insecurity, performance challenges, and stress during such experiences: working parents (American Psychological Association, 2022). This research also examines the role that personal resources, in the form of trait resiliency, play in the relationships between financial insecurity and behavioral and psychological outcomes including worrying, proactive behaviors, and stress. In a study of 636 working parents and their children, we find that financial insecurity heightens worrying, underscoring the threatening nature of the loss or anticipated loss of material resources. Worrying, in turn, promotes proactive behaviors at work-an effect that is more pronounced among high-resiliency individuals. However, worrying is also associated with elevated stress among high-resiliency individuals, providing support for a trait activation perspective (rather than buffering hypotheses) on ongoing, uncontrollable adversities. Taken together, our results help to (1) illuminate the impact of financial insecurity on work and well-being, (2) reveal a mechanism (i.e., worrying) that helps explain the links between financial insecurity and work and personal outcomes, and (3) expand our knowledge of the implications trait resiliency has for both psychological and behavioral reactions to ongoing crises.

Keywords: Financial insecurity; Resiliency; Well-being; Worrying.

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