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1. Introduction
The ongoing pandemic caused by the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has led to a major global crisis affecting billions of people and having a destructive impact on global economies (Kabadayi et al., 2020). Since its outbreak, medical and public health experts have offered different guidelines to slow down the virus's transmission. The most commonly offered measure has been social distancing, which refers to “efforts that aim […] to decrease or interrupt transmission of COVID-19 in a population (sub-)group by minimizing physical contact between […] individuals, or between population groups with high rates of transmission and population groups with no or a low level of transmission” (European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control [ECDC], 2020, p. 2). Social distancing includes a variety of measures with different impacts for different stakeholders (e.g. voluntary or mandatory self-quarantine and shelter-in-place orders, workplace and school closures, shifts to work from home, service at a distance and cancellations of public mass gatherings such as sporting and cultural events) (see ECDC, 2020).
While social distancing efforts aim to contain the virus and contribute to public health, they also create unprecedented challenges for service organizations and their employees around the world. Economic data and industrial reports indicate “service mega-disruptions” created by COVID-19 for businesses, in particular for the services sector (Kabadayi et al., 2020), with many companies struggling to maintain their “service continuity,” while others are just “hibernating” or even shutting down their operations, creating major implications and consequences for service employees and their well-being.
Prior research has studied the economic impact of social distancing as a disease control strategy undertaken by healthy individuals (Maharaj and Kleczkowski, 2012). However, no study has examined the impact created by social distancing during a pandemic on service organizations and the well-being of their employees. This article responds to the lack of research on service employee well-being (Edgar et al., 2017; Nasr et al., 2015) by developing a service ecosystem–based approach to investigate the impact of social distancing practices on employee well-being. More specifically, this framework suggests that as a result of social distancing practices, service organizations need to adopt “service continuation” or “service hibernation” and that this decision affects different dimensions of their employee well-being. Such understanding of employee...