Battling COVID-19: Public Personnel Management, Trust, and Social Resilience During a Global Crisis

We present three studies that examine the relationship between perceptions about public personnel management and social resilience during a crisis among frontline public healthcare servants who battled the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on theories of public personnel management, crisis management, trust, and resilience, we suggest a model and hypotheses that may extend our knowledge about perceived social resilience, both internal (organizational) and external (communal and national). We tested our model with the results of an online survey conducted in early 2021 among 437 healthcare employees from the Ministry of Health (n₁ = 87), hospitals (n₂ = 200), and Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs; n₃ = 150) across Israel. The findings generally support direct and indirect relationships between perceptions of good public personnel management, defined as healthcare system resilience, participation in decision-making and information sharing, and group-level organizational citizenship behavior, and perceived national and community resilience, and trust. Implications, extensions, and recommendations for future theoretical and empirical studies are discussed along with practical proposals.