What is it about?
Given the collateral damage of infections, a psychological mechanism named the behavioral immune system (BIS) evolved to prevent them. However, how BIS operates makes it unfit for the modern, high-contact, service-oriented economy. This paper reports the health-impairment process of BIS and how it can be managed.
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Why is it important?
The behavioral immune system (BIS) is part of our immune system that governs our survival and reproduction. Knowing why BIS deteriorates frontline service employees emotional vitality during pathogenic infections and ways to manage it is important for service sustainability and employee vitality. All indicators, such as urbanization, global warming, and animal domestication, point to an increasing frequency of pandemics in the future. Surviving and thriving through such events has thus become a necessary condition for business survival and societal flourishing.
Perspectives
The behavioral immune system (BIS) evolved to inhibit pathogens from getting into the body. But the BIS is overly sensitive. And the negative emotional content (disgust) is always experienced each time the BIS goes to work. So, I reasoned that BIS would eventually exhaust employees whose BIS is strong and have constant encounters with unfamiliar others, as in the case of a hotel, because of the repeated experience of negative emotion. It is my hope that our findings inform human resource management policies and practices during a pandemic to enhance employees' welfare and performance.
Collins Opoku Antwi
Zhejiang Normal University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Health-protective instinct and emotional exhaustion: The why and when perceived COVID-19 infectability emotionally drains frontline employees during a pandemic., International Journal of Stress Management, May 2024, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/str0000326.
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