“Effect of COVID-19 fear on nurse performance through insecurity and job satisfaction”

Apart from physical health problems, the COVID-19 outbreak also affected psychological health, causing extreme fear of this pandemic. Thus, this study aims to investigate the relationship between nurse performance and the fear of COVID-19 mediated by job insecurity and job satisfaction with conservation of resources theory as the lens. Data from 260 nurses were collected through an online structured questionnaire and analyzed using structural equation modeling-partial least squares. The direct effect findings show that COVID-19 fear influences job insecurity ( p < 0.05) but does not influence job satisfaction and nurse performance ( p > 0.05). Besides, job insecurity significantly influences job satisfaction and nurse performance ( p < 0.05). On the other hand, job satisfaction has no effect on nurse performance ( p > 0.05). Then, the indirect effect results show that job insecurity fully mediates the influence of COVID-19 fear on job satisfaction and nurse performance ( p < 0.05). Likewise, job satisfaction partially mediates the influence of job insecurity on nurse performance ( p < 0.05) but does not mediate the fear of COVID-19 on nurse performance ( p > 0.05). These findings provide evidence that the fear of COVID-19 plays an essential role for job insecurity, influencing job satisfaction and nurse performance. These results can develop strategies for better human resource management in nursing staff and provide pragmatic insight into the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.


INTRODUCTION
It is vital for health service providers and patients to access improved nurse performance (Hoşgör & Yaman, 2022).For healthcare providers, improved nurse performance will differentiate the institution from its competitors and make the health system function quickly (Chen et al., 2020).For patients, it will help recover from COVID-19 (Pourteimour et al., 2021).To make this happen, it is crucial to have a strong psychological background so that nurses perform high and stay dedicated to work.Therefore, psychological capital and nurse performance are essential during a pandemic (Hoşgör & Yaman, 2022).If this is not paid attention to, there will be an increase in COVID-19 cases, as happened in Indonesia.
The soaring number of patients is not matched by the readiness of health facilities; the number of nurses is not commensurate with the number of patients exposed to this virus, thus making nurses tired.It is also coupled with a heavy burden because they are the frontline workers who are most at high risk of being exposed to this virus.Many nurses work more than the required working hours and are hired and placed in new specialties with greater difficulty than before (Ahorsu et al., 2022;Maben & Bridges, 2020).There is limited personal protective equipment; thus, some nurses died while carrying out their duties, which gives rise to psychological problems, such as excessive fear of contracting this virus.Ultimately, they become incomplete in caring for patients, their work effectiveness becomes disrupted and causes job insecurity and dissatisfaction (Labrague & de Los Santos, 2021; Ahorsu et al., 2022).
It is interesting to use the conservation of resources (COR) theory as the basis for the research model.When nurses work in a state of fear due to the massive risk of transmission of COVID-19, feelings of insecurity at work will arise, such as tension, anxiety, and worry; this can weaken job satisfaction and decrease performance.

LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESES
The conservation of resources (COR) theory explains that everyone seeks to acquire, retain, store, maintain, and protect valuable resources, such as energy, time, reputation, relationships, and optimism (Hobfoll, 1989).Valuable resources consist of object resources (such as cars and houses), conditional resources (such as work and length of work), personal resources (such as skills, abilities, and individual character), and energy resources (such as time, knowledge, and money) (Ahmad & Bilal, 2023).When these resources are challenged, threatened, and exhausted, it will have an impact on individual psychological state (Rai & Verma, 2023).The COR theory explains the causes of stress; stress arises because key resources are threatened with loss, extinction, and failure to obtain them with great effort (Mao et al., 2021).Thus, individuals tend to avoid causes of stress so that their resources can be maintained and protected.
The COR theory explains that work is a valuable resource that will be used up and reduced by the impact of COVID- The questionnaire consists of two parts.Table 1 shows the outcomes of the first section, which describes the characteristics of the sample.The AVE value should be above the threshold of 0.5, and CR has to be higher than 0.7 (Table 2).Table 3 shows the results of the Fornell-Larcker criteria by looking at the AVE value of each variable at the square root; its value must be higher than the correlation between constructs and other research constructs.Table 4 presents the results of the HTMT; all variables have HTMT values below 0.90 (Henseler et al., 2015).Thus, the evaluation of the reflective measurement model is feasible.2019) explained that full mediation occurs if the direct influence is insignificant and the influence through mediation is significant; if the direct influence and influence through mediation are significant, partial mediation will occur (Table 5).

DISCUSSION
This study is interesting because fear of COVID-19 does not affect nurse performance (H 1 ).This happens because nurses have become significant frontline players in the health sector, so they continue to prioritize the quality of their performance by building interpersonal relationships, such as adapting and being able to manage emotions to avoid the fear of COVID-19 while treating patients.This is the main duty of nurses, namely providing care to patients under any circumstances, as pledged in the nursing oath.Another reason is that the number of COVID-19 cases has decreased so that fear is no longer at its peak because the cure

CONCLUSION
This paper analyzes the influence of fear of COVID-19 on nurses' performance through job insecurity and job satisfaction.The results show that fear of COVID-19 has a direct impact on job insecurity but has no impact on job satisfaction and nurse performance.On the other hand, job insecurity has a significant impact on job satisfaction and nurse performance, but job satisfaction has no impact on nurse performance.In addition, the extraordinary fear of the COVID-19 pandemic is indirectly related to job satisfaction and performance of nurses through job insecurity.In addition, job satisfaction mediates the relationship between job insecurity and nurse performance but does not mediate the relationship between fear of COVID-19 and nurse performance.Consequently, job insecurity brought on by a fear of the coronavirus is the root cause of nurses' low job satisfaction and performance.
This study has several limitations.This study used a cross-sectional design; with other considerations, a longitudinal design can be used to understand the model to be proposed.Next, job insecurity and job satisfaction act as mediating variables between the fear of COVID-19 and nurse performance.Future research can introduce other psychological variables.Then, the unit of analysis used is a nurse so the results cannot be generalized to other health workers.Finally, the research object is a hospital, so the findings cannot be generalized to other sectors.For this reason, future research can test this model in other sectors to fully comprehend the effect of the fear of COVID-19.
(Sun et al., 2022)21)21).Chen and Eyoun (2021)andTo et al. (2020)supported the idea that job insecurity is an event that causes stress, which can harm employee satisfaction and performance.There is a relationship between the fear of COVID-19 and the performance of frontline employees through job insecurity(Sun et al., 2022).It is assumed that there is a sense of fear in nurses because nurses are at the forefront of handling COVID-19 cases, thus triggering job insecurity and having a high risk of transmission.With this incident, there was a high psychological burden on nurses, so nurses became unable to focus on work.The COR theory explains that employ- (Chen & Eyoun, 2021)2021))e job description(Qin & Jiang, 2011).Simply put, if someone does a good job, he has good work performance(Pacheco et al., 2020).Referring to this, nurses in government and private agencies carry out their work duties(Kirkpatrick et al., 2019).If nurses carry out their job duties properly, the work will be effective and of good quality.Therefore,Pacheco et al. (2020)argue that nurse performance is related to how well nurses complete the assigned work roles.Fear arises because of unpleasant emotional conditions caused by perceived threats (Chen & Eyoun, 2021).Sarfraz et al. (2022) stated that fear is a feeling that arises from danger or threats.So, fear arises when individuals view COVID-19 as a real threat.The high fear of COVID-19 dangers makes it difficult for individuals to think clearly and stay rational.This is characterized by physical reactions (such as heart palpitations and sweating), emotional reactions (such as anxiety, worry, and fear), mental reactions (such as the resources, such as individual behavior and community encouragement (Aguiar-Quintana et al., 2021).Since the COVID-19 outbreak, many employees have been infected with the coronavirus and thus absent from work.This event caused the company to experience many losses, such as a surge in production because the production process stopped.Companies took action to close or reduce the amount of production, ultimately affecting employee job security, such as loss of employee economic resources (Vo-Thanh et al., 2020).Therefore, job insecurity can reduce important individual resources and create a significant psychological burden on employees, which can reduce creativity and cause tension in the workplace.In addition, job insecurity hurts job satisfaction(Nemteanu & Dabija, 2021).COR theory explains that mental and physical damage is caused by high job insecurity shown through negative attitudes, which ultimately results in decreased work satisfaction (ees experience job insecurity when they feel the threat of losing resources and having insufficient resources(Chen & Eyoun, 2021).Thus, the threat of loss of resources can lead to job dissatisfaction and job insecurity.According to Choudhary and Saini (2021), job insecurity occurs due to a threat, and this will raise a sense of fear that will cause loss of resources, feelings of fatigue, decreased employee well-being, and work dissatisfaction.Therefore, during a pandemic, nurses have a high sense of fear of losing their resources, resulting in job insecurity and low job satisfaction.

Table 1 .
Sample characteristics complete filling, and the remaining 225 responses were processed further.Thus, the response rate is 86.53%; the data were entered into an Excel worksheet and imported into SmartPLS 3.

Table 2 .
Measurement model results

Table 4 .
HTMT (discriminant validity) Satrianto et al., 2023).If the t-value is greater than 1.96 and p < 0.05, the hypothesized relationship can be accepted.The mediation hypotheses were tested using SmartPLS with the bootstrap technique (Hair et al., 2019).Hair et al. ( Hair et al. (2019)f COVID-19; JI = Job Insecurity; JS = Job Satisfaction; NP = Nurse Performance.Before testing the hypotheses, the study tested R-square (R 2 ) and f-square (f 2 ) to measure effect size and Stone-Geisser (Q 2 ) to measure predictive relevance, as shown in Table5.The R 2 value shows that fear of COVID-19 causes a change in job insecurity by 26%, a change in job satisfaction by 54%, and a change in nurse performance by 61%.Hair et al. (2019)said that an R 2 value of

Table 5 .
Cheng and Kao (2022)h coefficients, and mediation analysisThis study explains that job insecurity can reduce nurse performance through job satisfac-tion (H 9 ).This means that during a pandemic, work uncertainty peaked, reducing job satisfaction and decreasing nurse performance.Referring to this, to improve nurse performance, the hospital must be able to ensure the job security of nurses, because high job security will increase job satisfaction.In line with the perspec-tive byCheng and Kao (2022), there are adverse effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, namely the emergence of psychological phenomena, such as job instability, which can reduce job satisfaction and nurse performance. I contrast to H 10 , fear due to COVID-19 on nurse performance is not mediated by job satisfaction.