Exploring The Role Of Emotional Intelligence Role In Mitigating Pandemic Stress And Supporting Remote Work And Work Performance In The Automotive Industry
Abstract
COVID-19 pandemic created a new work environment in which remote work, particularly working from home (WFH), became mandatory across many industries, including the automotive industry in Malaysia. As the pandemic created a new normal in work arrangements and generated stress, the impact on employees’ work performance became an interesting phenomenon to study. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the effect of pandemic-generated stress and remote work (WFH) on work performance, and the moderating role of emotional intelligence during COVID-19 among employees in the Malaysian automotive industry. By employing a post-positivist approach using a cross-sectional, quantitative, unveiled interestingdescriptive and deductive research design, this study surveyed 466 samples from 19,831 population from PROTON and Perodua. The PLS-SEM approach to data analysis unveiled interesting findings with pandemic-generated stress having a positive and significant relationship with remote work (WFH) where the latter had a positive but insignificant relationship with work performance. Further to that, emotional intelligence moderated the relationship of pandemic-generated stress but not of remote work (WFH) with work performance. The predictive accuracy of the model is 0.760 but, with a low predictive power against benchmarked models. This study has also indirectly insinuated the various interventions carried out during the pandemic to alleviate pandemic-generated stress and promote remote work. Additionally, the important role of emotional intelligence in mitigating the effect of pandemic-generated stress was confirmed and caused to more research in the future to explore other variables influencing work performance with a more multi-faceted research approach especially during a crisis such as pandemic.
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Publication Date
01 September 2026
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European Publisher
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1st Edition
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1-1
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Accounting and Finance, Business and Management, Communication, Law and Governance
Cite this article as:
Mohd Said, R. A., Abdul Rashid*, M. A., & Othman, M. N. A. (2026). Exploring The Role Of Emotional Intelligence Role In Mitigating Pandemic Stress And Supporting Remote Work And Work Performance In The Automotive Industry. In Y. Naoyuki, A. Peng Hwa, & J. Matthes (Eds.), GLY-Upcoming Volume: Innovating Together: The Convergence of Management, Communication, and The Digital Transformation, vol -. European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences (pp. 0-0). European Publisher. https://doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2026.09.51