Leading and Working From Home in Times of COVID-19: On the Perceived Changes in Leadership Behaviors

Due to the COVID-19 crisis, managers and employees in many organizations suddenly are forced to work from home. Although working from home (WFH) is not a new phenomenon, it is new in its current scale and scope because of COVID-19. Against this background, we investigate the effect of WFH during the COVID-19 crisis on changes in leadership behaviors, and associated changes in perceived manager quality and productivity, at different hierarchical levels in organizations. Based on the literature, we develop two predictions in opposite directions. On the one hand, implementing WFH may force managers to show less direction and control and especially more delegation. On the other hand, research into the effects of exogenous shocks such as COVID-19, suggests that managers may become more controlling and delegate less. Consistent with the first prediction, we find that managers perceive they execute significantly less control and delegate more. Employees also perceive a significant decrease in control, however they perceive on average no change in delegation. Furthermore, and in line with the second prediction, employees of lower-level managers even report a significant decrease in delegation. Finally, our results show that increased delegation is associated with increased perceived productivity and higher manager quality. Together, these results suggest that in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, the effectiveness of WFH might be hampered by the fact that required changes in leadership behaviors, in particular in delegation, are difficult to realize in times of crisis.

The COVID-19 crisis strongly affects how and where managers and employees do their work. In most countries, governments decided in early 2020, almost overnight, that people should work from home as much as possible. Clearly, the concept of working from home (WFH) is not new. Since the 1970s the concept of "teleworking" or "telecommuting" has been around as a way to establish more flexibility in organizations (Haddon & Lewis, 1994). An Ipsos/Reuters poll showed that already in 2012, about 20% of employees in developed and developing countries worked remotely to some extent (Reaney, 2012). But what is new, is the scope and scale by which people work from home in 2020. A survey by Gartner (2020) indicates that across the globe, one-half of the companies had more than 80% of their employees WFH during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the major differences between WFH and "normal" working conditions is that managers have to manage their employees at a distance, which could have implications for their behaviors (Bonet & Salvador, 2017). Indeed, the Financial Times recently coined the term "arms-length managers" to describe the new reality for managers (Hill, 2020). In the current manuscript, we therefore investigate how COVID-19-induced WFH affects leadership behaviors in organizations.
In testing these effects, we depart from the notion that given the COVID-19 crisis, managers and employees do not only have to deal with the fact that they suddenly have to work from home, but that COVID-19 also simultaneously and unprecedentedly implies an exogenous external threat in terms of health or economic implications. The combination of these features turns the COVID-19 crisis into a truly unique, multifaceted crisis. As a result, we propose that the crisis may have different-in fact opposite-effects on leadership behaviors. On the one hand, WFH during the COVID-19 crisis implies by definition that managers and employees will be separated from each other in a physical sense and that managers cannot execute their role in the same way as they do in situations where they are in the same location as their employees. Consequently, one prediction is that in response to COVID-19-induced WFH, ceteris paribus managers will show less directive or controlling behaviors, and more delegation of responsibilities toward their employees.
On the other hand, following earlier findings on the effect of other crises such as the 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 crisis could also trigger a threat-rigidity response from managers. Managers and employees are not working from home because they suddenly decided that it was the preferred working arrangement, but it was forced upon them because of the COVID-19 crisis-an unprecedented health and economic crisis. Such situations of crises obviously affect both managers and employees because crises create uncertainty and stress, and thereby affect behaviors (Fritsche et al., 2011). Recent research into the effects of the 2008 financial crisis on leadership behavior (Stoker et al., 2019) shows, for instance, that the 2008 financial crisis went along with a significant increase in directive leadership across the board. This finding can be explained by the threat-rigidity hypothesis (Staw et al., 1981) which poses that individuals and organizations react to an external threat, such as a crisis, with actions that reflect rigidity. Research on neuropsychology in response to threat and uncertainty confirms this hypothesis. It shows that the anxiety that results from uncertainty and threat, leads to more careful, rigid, and halting approach behavior (Gray & McNaughton, 2000;McGregor et al., 2010). Consequently, an alternative second prediction is that this increased rigidity also happened in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, and thus may translate to the increased directive and controlling behaviors of managers, and less delegation of responsibilities.
Next to the fact that the change to WFH during COVID-19 may thus have opposing implications for leadership behaviors, based on earlier research (e.g., Fleenor et al., 2010), it is also conceivable that the perception of these effects on leadership behaviors differs between managers and employees. In fact, this is particularly likely, given the realities of WFH. Even though managers and employees may have different perceptions of leadership behaviors under normal situations, the potential for such divergence is radically larger if both are working from home and thus lack many of the channels and opportunities for seeing how the other is doing. This further amplifies the possibility that managers and employees may diverge in their perceptions of how COVID-19-induced WFH affects leadership. In fact, surveys conducted in the first months of the COVID-19 crisis among employees and employers suggest this to be the case, with employees feeling less supported than executives think (IBM, 2021).
To test these predictions, we conducted a study during the initial lockdown period (Spring 2020) using a survey among managers and employees in the Netherlands, to empirically test these two predictions against each other, by measuring the effects of leading and working from home during the COVID-19 crisis on the changes in leadership behaviors at different hierarchical levels in organizations, from both managers' and employees' perspectives. Specifically, and following the literature, we focus on two behaviors that are highly relevant both in the context of a crisis (Stoker et al., 2019) and in the context of WFH (Bailey & Kurland, 2002;Clear & Dickson, 2005). Namely, we investigate the changes in control and delegation. We study the perceptions of managers and employees (Ns = 404 and 561, respectively). Moreover, we explore whether these changes are related to the perceived quality of the manager and perceived productivity.
By doing so, our study makes several contributions. First, our study contributes to understanding the interactive effects of WFH and an external threat on changes in leadership behaviors. The study took place during the initial stages of the first lockdown in the Netherlands in April and May 2020, when most countries went into a government-mandated lock-down that forced most managers and employees to work from home. This situation created a research setting that is unprecedented and cannot be mimicked in the lab. Second, our findings add to the literature on organizational change and the literature into effects of large-scale, exogenous shocks or "disaster" literature more generally. Specifically, for WFH, the literature has been focused on the consequences of WFH in a context where organizations and managers intentionally and voluntarily chose to implement this type of organizational change (Bailey & Kurland, 2002). Our study is among the first to investigate the consequences of WFH when this type of organizational change is imposed upon managers and employees. In the field of disaster literature (Klomp & Valckx, 2014), looking at actual behavioral responses after exogenous shocks such as COVID-19 is rare, and our paper therefore tries to address this lack of knowledge.

WFH and Leadership Behaviors
Organizations started implementing WFH in the 1970s, and by now several studies have looked into the effects of WFH, or related concepts such as telecommuting, teleworking, and virtual work. Although most research has focused on employees (for an overview see, e.g., Makarius & Larson, 2017), Bloom et al. (2015) found that it is also becoming more and more common for managers to work from home occasionally: the share of managers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany allowed to WFH during normal hours is almost 50%.
Managing from a distance has strong implications for employees and managers. Research shows that WFH, in general, has beneficial outcomes, both in terms of proximal variables such as perceived autonomy and lower work-family conflict, as well as distal variables such as job satisfaction, performance, turnover intention (Gajendran & Harrison, 2007), and productivity (Allen et al., 2014). Importantly, Allen et al. (2015) found that the relationship between managers and employees is not harmed by WFH. At the same time, it is also clear that there are downsides in WFH, both for employees and managers. Drawbacks for employees are that they have less social interaction, they have to maintain boundaries between work and nonwork (Ramarajan & Reid, 2013), and they often do not have space in their homes to attend to work (Bloom et al., 2015).
For managers, the main downside is (perceived) loss of control over their employees (Bailey & Kurland, 2002;Clear & Dickson, 2005). Based on a literature review, Bailey and Kurland (2002) state that managers are often reluctant to implement WFH, mainly because of this fear of losing control of employees (see also Kniffin et al., 2021). Indeed, research shows that managers of telecommuters often show greater task-oriented leadership than relation-oriented leadership (Madlock, 2012), whereas such task-oriented, close monitoring behavior is shown to be ineffective toward employees who work from home (Lautsch et al., 2009). Second, a main implication of WFH is that managers are expected to delegate responsibilities to their employees. Because of the fact that employees work from a distance, they are expected to get autonomy and responsibilities for topics such as working time, place, results, and methods (Contreras et al., 2020). Consequently, managers will have to share their power and delegate responsibilities to their employees (Cortellazzo et al., 2019).
When combined, these findings imply that at the level of leadership styles, two styles are especially relevant for WFH, namely directive leadership and empowering leadership (Lorinkova et al., 2013). Managers showing directive leadership are seen as giving clear and detailed directions to employees, exercising control, and expecting compliance with instructions (see, e.g., House, 1971;Kamphuis et al., 2011;Lorinkova et al., 2013;Somech, 2006). Empowering leadership can be defined as sharing or delegating power and allocating autonomy and responsibilities to employees (Cheonga et al., 2019). In order to be effective, managers are expected to lower their level of directive leadership and to increase their level of empowering leadership, because the behaviors that constitute these styles are important for the employees who work from home. Therefore, in this study, we examine the changes in these two leadership styles. We do so by investigating changes in two specific behaviors that can be seen as high representative of these two styles. We thus cast "exercising control" as a prime behavioral example of directive leadership, and "delegation" as a prime behavioral example of empowering leadership.
WFH often means that only employees telecommute, whereas in the current COVID-19 crisis both employees and managers work from home. Research indicates that this dual nature of WFH matters. Based on a large dataset of more than 11,000 respondents, Golden and Fromen (2011) conclude that employees with telecommuting managers responded less positively than those with managers in a traditional work mode, both in terms of work experiences (feedback, empowerment, professional development, and workload) and outcomes such as lower job satisfaction and higher turnover intentions. Basing themselves on social exchange theory (Blau, 1964;Homans, 1958), the authors suggest that these detrimental effects of telecommuting are caused by deteriorated relationships between managers and employees (Golden & Fromen, 2011).
More generally, when it comes to perceptions of managers' behaviors, such perceptions often differ between managers and employees (Lee & Carpenter, 2018). Managers tend to rate themselves higher on their own leadership behaviors than their employees (Fleenor et al., 2010). Especially in the context of an organizational change such as the implementation of WFH, this finding seems relevant. For the implementation of a concept that has comparable consequences for managers and employees, that is working in self-managing teams, Stoker and Van der Heijden (2001) report that managers have inflated perceptions of their own behaviors when it concerns the "desired" changes in leadership that fit with the new concept (see also Stoker, 2006). In a similar vein, it can be expected that in a WFH context where leaders are "expected" to show less control and more delegation, it is likely that managers will have an inflated perception of the decrease in controlling behavior and the increase the delegation of responsibilities.

WFH and Hierarchical Levels of Leaders
Leadership behaviors often differ across hierarchical levels of managers. This difference is primarily caused by physical distance, defined as "how far or how close followers are located from their leader" (Antonakis & Atwater, 2002, p. 684). Greater hierarchical differences in organizations often manifest in a greater physical distance, and in a lower frequency of direct interaction (Chun et al., 2009). There is a direct relationship between distance and hierarchy, such that it is more likely that managers at lower hierarchical levels have less physical distance with their employees than higher-level managers.
As a consequence, lower-level managers have more interactions with employees than higher-level managers, making it more likely that directive and more specifically controlling behavior is more prevalent among those managers. With respect to delegation, Jago and Vroom (1977) suggest a greater propensity for delegating behaviors at higher organizational levels. Empirical findings by Yukl and Fu (1999) indeed show that more delegation was used toward an employee who was, just like the manager him/herself, also a supervisor. Related, although not specifically testing the effect for different hierarchical levels, Haselhuhn et al. (2017) found that managers who feel powerless are less willing to delegate decision-making authority. Arguably, managers higher up the hierarchical ladder feel more powerful (Lammers et al., 2009), thereby suggesting that also the level of delegation will differ across hierarchical levels.
To conclude, without considering the current enforced move toward WFH, research strongly indicates that WFH affects both the possibility and the desirability for managers to show certain leadership behaviors. Because of the increased physical distance, managers can simply execute less control. Moreover, they are supposed to delegate more responsibilities. Crucially, we expect that changes in these leadership behaviors differ across hierarchical levels. Given the fact that for higherlevel managers, the physical distance that goes along with WFH is already much more common than for lower-level managers, one can expect the changes in leadership behaviors to be the strongest for lower-level managers.
In our view, these conclusions about the relationship between WFH and leadership behaviors are relevant for WFH that was enforced upon organizations because of COVID-19 (see for a similar line of reasoning the position papers by Kniffin et al., 2021;Rudolph et al., 2020). As such, the tendency that WFH will affect leadership behaviors in the perception of both managers and employees seems relatively straightforward if one could zoom in or isolate the enforced WFH aspect of the COVID crisis. But this assumption would require that the implementation of WFH and the COVID crisis can empirically be separated, which is of course not possible, because of their simultaneous occurrence across the globe.

The Effect of a Crisis on Leadership Behaviors
Leaving aside the possible WFH ramifications for leadership behaviors, there is also the question of what a largescale crisis such as the COVID-19 as such could imply for perceived changes in leadership behaviors (Bartsch et al., 2020). The COVID-19 crisis can be looked upon as an external threat to organizations from both a health and an economic perspective. In their seminal paper on the threatrigidity hypothesis, Staw et al. (1981, p. 502) define a threat as "an environmental event that has impending negative consequences for the entity." In this hypothesis, managerial responses to such threats are characterized by a restriction of information processing and constriction of control within the organization (Staw et al., 1981). For the 2008 financial crisis, Stoker et al. (2019) translated these managerial responses to leadership behaviors, and argue and show that this crisis led to an increase in directive leadership (see also Kamphuis et al., 2011). In addition, Feenstra et al. (2020) show that managers who perceive their position to be under threat, show less empowering leadership and delegate less responsibilities toward their employees in such situations (see also Mead & Maner, 2012).
In the threat-rigidity hypothesis, the environment is characterized by fundamental uncertainty as a result of a unique and unprecedented shock. Chattopadhyay et al. (2001) coin the latter as a "control-reducing threat," where managers act in order to maintain control and to reduce the threat, by tightening their grip on the organization and their subordinates. Clearly, this description also applies to the COVID-19 crisis, which would imply that managers would show the same behaviors as were found in the context of other, similar threats. Therefore, it can be argued that the COVID-19 crisis could lead to a situation in which managers are inclined to increase their levels of control and decrease their delegation of responsibilities.

Overview of Research
As we described above, the combined WFH and COVID-19 shocks can possibly have opposing implications for perceived changes in leadership behaviors. Applied to the actual case of WFH following the outbreak of the COVID-19 crisis in the Spring of 2020, we explore the perceived changes in leadership behaviors according to managers and employees by investigating two leadership behaviors-exercising control and delegating responsibilities-that are exemplary behaviors for two leadership styles, namely directive and empowering leadership, respectively.
More specifically, for managers, we expect that WFH during the COVID-19 led to a change in their own perceived behaviors that is fully in line with what is expected from them in such a WFH context. Following the literature (Fleenor et al., 2010;Stoker & Van der Heijden, 2001), we argue that managers themselves will perceive that they show less controlling behavior and delegate more responsibilities toward their employees. Moreover, we propose that such an effect will be more pronounced for managers in lower management positions (Haselhuhn et al., 2017).
For the employees' perceptions of changes in leadership behaviors, the expected combined impact of WFH and the COVID-19 crisis is not as straightforward. On the one hand, following earlier research (Golden & Fromen, 2011), WFH would mean that managers will show less controlling behavior and more delegation. On the other hand, following literature on the impact of an external threat (Stoker et al., 2019), one could envision a change in even the opposite direction. Namely, such a crisis could lead to an increase in the exercise of control, and at least not an increase or maybe even a decrease in delegation. Moreover, since WFH has especially a strong effect on lower-level managers (Madlock, 2012), we also expect that the changes in perceived behaviors will be more pronounced for the employees of these lower-level managers.
Finally, we expect that changes in leadership behaviors relate to outcomes. More specifically, we will investigate whether changes in control and delegation are associated with the perceived quality of the manager, and perceived productivity. Based on the literature, it can be expected that an increase in exercising control will be negatively correlated with such outcomes (Lautsch et al., 2009), whereas an increase in delegation will be expected to be positively correlated with these variables.

Sample and Procedure
We collected data among employees and managers in the Netherlands between mid-April and mid-May 2020. This time frame allowed us to measure respondents' reactions and perceptions of WFH, because our data collection started about 1 month after the (Dutch) government centrally requested WFH for all nonessential workers from March 16th onwards (Rijksoverheid, 2020). Respondents were approached via a website of a management platform (MT.nl). This online platform offers content to professionals and managers in the Netherlands. Calls to participate in the study were shared via the website, and via social media such as Twitter and LinkedIn. Respondents were offered the opportunity to participate in a gift-voucher raffle in exchange for their participation. We did not set an a priori sample size, but simply maximized participation within a fixed time frame.
We recorded 748 complete responses (316 men, 431 women, and 1 other). The mean age was 47.4 years. For our sample of respondents, 30.5% were in nonmanagement, 23.5% in lower management, 27.7% were in middle management, and 18.4% were in top management. Note that some of these respondents were self-employed and/or currently did not have a manager. In both cases, these participants were excluded from the analysis. In terms of education, 40% completed a bachelor's degree in Applied Sciences, 52% received a master's degree, and 8% a high school degree. In terms of the economic sector, 9% worked in manufacturing, 32% worked in trade and commercial or financial services, 46% worked in nonprofit organizations, and 13% in other sectors.
All participants completed the measures below. The data were collected as part of a combined project testing multiple independent research questions in one larger combined questionnaire (including loneliness and leadership ideals). These variables are not discussed here.

Measures
Self-rated Changes in Leadership Behaviors. As explained above, perceived changes in key aspects of the directive and empowering leadership were measured by focusing on two specific leadership behaviors. For a key aspect of directive leadership, we selected the exercise of control, by asking managers: "are you exercising less or more control towards your employees, since the start of the corona-crisis?" For a key aspect of empowering leadership, we selected delegation, and asked managers: "are you delegating less or more towards your employees, since the start of the corona-crisis?" Both items were self-developed. Respondents could answer on a 7-point scale between −3 (a lot less) and +3 (a lot more) with a neutral midpoint 0 (the same).
Changes in Leadership Behavior According to Employees. For employees, we measured the same two leadership behaviors. We asked employees: "is your manager exercising less or more control towards you, since the start of the corona-crisis?" and: "is your manager delegating less or more to you, since the start of the corona-crisis?" respectively. Both items were answered on the same 7-point scale between −3 (a lot less) and +3 (a lot more) with a neutral midpoint 0 (the same).
Leadership Position. Those respondents who currently held a management position (n = 404) indicated their own position, where they could choose between lower (n = 116), middle (n = 169), and higher management (n = 119). Those respondents who were being supervised (n = 561) indicated the position of their own manager on that same scale, between lower (n = 113), middle (n = 183), and higher management (n = 265). In total, 347 respondents indicated that they were managers themselves and that they currently had a manager to whom they reported. These respondents therefore answered both the questions with respect to the perceived changes in their own behaviors, and the questions about the perceived changes in their manager's behaviors.
Manager Quality. Respondents indicated how satisfied they were with the overall quality of their manager on a 7-point scale, between 1 = very unsatisfied and 7 = very satisfied.

Productivity Self-reported; Employees and Colleagues.
Respondents indicated if their own productivity and that of their employees or colleagues had improved after the start of the COVID-19 crisis, on a 7-point scale, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).

Controls.
To check for possible effects of biographical characteristics of the manager and the employee, we asked for their gender, age, tenure, and education, and percentage WFH. For the latter, respondents had to answer the question "To which degree is your job currently done remotely" (answering options: 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%).
Approximately 74.5% of the managers and 79.8% of the employees indicated that they worked 75% or more from home at the time of filling out the survey.

Manager Perceptions of Changes in Leadership Behaviors
We first analyzed how managers perceive changes in their own leadership behaviors, see Table 1.

Employee Perceptions of Changes in Leadership Behaviors
Next, we focused on the questions of whether and how employees perceive changes in the two leadership behaviors. The perceptions of employees are summarized in Table 2.
When testing whether the average perceived changes in the two leadership behaviors differ significantly between managers and employees, the independent samples t-test results (equal variances assumed) showed that there was no significant difference for control (t = 0.945, p = .345), but there was a significant difference for delegation (t = 3.506, p = .0001). Additional analyses showed no significant differences for subsamples that relate to gender, age, or percentage working from home, both for managers and employees. Note. Score on a 7-point scale between −3 (a lot less) and +3 (a lot more) with a neutral midpoint 0 (the same). ANOVA = analysis of variance.  Note. Means with different subscripts differ at p < .05 (Tukey's HSD). Score on a 7-point scale between −3 (a lot less) and +3 (a lot more) with a neutral midpoint 0 (the same). ANOVA = analysis of variance. a Note that for delegation the N was 184.

Correlations Between Changes in Leadership Behaviors, and Manager Quality and Productivity
Finally, we investigated whether both managers' and employees' perceptions of changes in leadership behaviors are associated with outcome measures. For managers, we presented the Pearson correlations between perceived changes in their leadership behaviors with the perception of changes in their own productivity and their employees (see Table 3). Table 4 shows that for employees the Pearson correlations between perceived changes in control and delegation with manager quality and productivity. The main result for managers is that perceived changes in their own level of delegation correlated significantly and positively with the productivity of their employees (r = .11, p = .026) and with their own productivity (r = .168, p = .001), indicating that managers see an increase in productivity of themselves and their employees when they report to delegate more after the start of the COVID-19 crisis. For the perceived changes in control there were no significant correlations with these two productivity variables, see Table 3.
For employees, we found comparable results. Table 4 shows that perceived changes in delegation were also significantly positively correlated with manager quality (r = .269, p = .0001) and the productivity as perceived by employees for themselves (r = .177, p = .0001) as well as their colleagues (r = .125, p = .003). Clearly, employees who have a manager who delegates more after the COVID-19 crisis, perceive themselves and their colleagues to be more productive. Again, perceived change in control was not significantly correlated with productivity. Also note that both for managers and employees, there was no significant correlation between the changes in the control and delegation, indicating that the two leadership behaviors are clearly distinct from each other.
To be clear, these are mere associations, and further research is needed to establish whether the reported changes in leadership actually drive changes in outcomes such as productivity. Interestingly, our results are in line with a recent large survey among U.S. workers who also report to be more productive after being enforced to WFH after the start of the COVID-19 crisis (Barrero et al., 2020).

Summary
We investigated whether COVID-19 and the associated need to work from home led to changes in leadership behaviors in a study conducted among Dutch managers and employees. Our results show first of all that managers' perceptions of the changes in their behaviors are in line with the expected or "desired" direction of the WFH concept. That is, managers perceived that they showed significantly less control and more delegation in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic (April and May 2020), irrespective of their management level. In contrast, although employees also perceive a significant decrease in the exercise of control by their manager, they do not observe a change in delegation. Moreover, those who are supervised at the lower-management level even perceive a decrease in delegation. Also, managers and employees' perceptions about the change in delegation significantly differed. Finally, our results suggest that when WFH, employees especially appreciate an increase in delegation, because such an increase is associated with higher selfreported productivity and productivity of colleagues, and higher perceived manager quality.

Theoretical and Practical Implications
Our results partly confirm our a priori predictions. In line with the WFH literature (e.g., Bailey & Kurland, 2002;Gajendran and Harrison, 2007;Kniffin et al., 2021), which argues for changes in leadership behaviors, we observe that managers, irrespective of their management level, perceive their behaviors to have changed in the-for WFH-"appropriate" direction. Specifically, managers perceive themselves to be less controlling and more delegating. Especially for the latter, it can be argued that in this context of WFH, delegating responsibilities to employees is a crucial skill or behavior that managers have to aspire. It is therefore likely, especially since employees do not perceive  such an increase, that managers might be biased in their perception of these changes in this "desired" behavior. This finding is corroborated by the literature on self-enhancement (Fleenor et al., 2010), particularly in a context of organizational change (Stoker, 2006).
For employees, we proposed that the effect of the combination of WFH and the COVID-19 crisis as an external shock could lead to different and even opposing effects on perceived changes in leadership behaviors. We find that, in line with WFH literature, managers are perceived to be showing less control. However, employees do not perceive an expected increase in delegation, which can be seen as indicative of the fact that managers might find it difficult to show such leadership behaviors in times of a severe crisis, such as COVID-19. Moreover, employees from managers at lowerlevel management perceive even a significant decrease in delegation, implying that at this level, a threat-rigidity effect (Staw et al., 1981) overrides the WFH context. This result is even more relevant when confronted with our finding that an increase in delegation, as reported by employees, is positively associated with perceived manager quality and productivity during the COVID-19 crisis.
Our paper makes the following theoretical contributions. First, our results enrich the WFH literature. Following this line of research, WFH has positive outcomes for employees, such as perceived autonomy, lower work-family conflict, and productivity (Allen et al., 2014). For employees to be effective, delegation of responsibilities of managers is important (Cortellazzo et al., 2019). Also, in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, our results suggest that managers are instrumental in this respect, in particular via increases in their delegation, which is associated with perceived productivity. Therefore, our results suggest that even in a context where WFH is not a deliberate organizational choice, but instead is implemented in response to an external threat, employees and managers still experience the benefit of this key aspect of empowering leadership when they work from home.
However, the COVID-19 crisis thus also constitutes an external threat which implies that managers, at least according to their employees, do not delegate more than they did before the COVID-19 crisis. As reported previously, the well-known downside for managers in the context of WFH is the fear of losing control. This anxiety seems to be exacerbated by the external threat of the COVID-19 crisis (Kniffin et al., 2021;Rudolph et al., 2020), especially for lower-level managers. In this way, our study contributes to a better understanding of the consequences of an organizational change for leadership behaviors when the external environment is in a state of flux (Feenstra et al., 2020;Oreg & Berson, 2019).
On a more fundamental level, the fact that WFH was implemented in organizations overnight as well as involuntary, makes for an unprecedented organizational change which is completely at odds with the conditions under which WFH has been studied so far (Kniffin et al., 2021;Rudolph et al., 2020). Organizational changes, such as the implementation of WFH, are mostly based on a set of basic change management processes and principles (Stouten et al., 2018) that do not include enforced and unplanned organizational change such as currently is the case. For instance, under "normal" conditions, the success of WFH depends on managers' trust in employees (Kaplan et al., 2018), the possibility of alternative output controls (Groen et al., 2018), and even new monitoring techniques (Bhave et al., 2020). These conditions are clearly not (automatically) met in the COVID-19 situation, when the implementation of WFH in early 2020 was involuntary and abrupt. Therefore, WFH in times of COVID-19 asks for a radical rethink of and consequently novel research into such change situations.
In terms of practical implications, there are a few suggestions that might be helpful for practitioners who have to deal with WFH. First, our results indicate that if there is one leadership behavior that needs to be developed in a WFH context, it is delegation. Crucially, our results show that during the COVID-19 crisis, the perception of changes in delegation differs significantly between managers and employees. Our results serve as a reminder that, on average, manager self-perceptions, like all self-perceptions, suffer from selfenhancement (Dunning et al., 2004), especially when it concerns behaviors that are essential to the new concept, in our case the concept of WFH. Such self-enhancement has implications for managers and practitioners such as HR professionals. For managers, it is recommended to regularly ask for feedback on behaviors from employees and peers. For HR professionals, such differences in self-other ratings can be used in training and development settings, where managers not only learn how to develop new or different leadership behaviors, but also learn how to collect and use feedback (Stoker & Van der Heijden, 2001).
Secondly, it should be taken into account that the alleged positive effects of WFH on (perceived) manager-employee relations are counterbalanced by the impact of the external threat of COVID-19, which reinforces the attention that organizations should pay to the question of whether the warranted increase in delegation of responsibilities actually occurs. In line with the findings of Feenstra et al. (2020), our results seem to confirm that managers might find it difficult to share their power when they are under threat. Therefore, if organizations expect their managers, who also WFH in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, to delegate responsibilities to their employees, it is important to pay attention to feelings of insecurity or instability of these managers, which can be done, for example, by the HR department.
Thirdly, both managers and employees currently have to work from home without the supporting context that needs to go along with this organizational change. Our results not only point at the importance of thinking about necessary activities to train or develop leadership behaviors in the direction that supports WFH, but also at the relevance of providing employees and managers with proper instruments to work from home in an effective manner. Following insights from the WFH and virtual teams' literature, it seems especially important to equip managers with different types of communication technologies to connect and engage with their employees (Crisp & Jarvenpaa, 2013). Consequently, managers should have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to work effectively with such technologies. Moreover, it requires organizations to provide their managers and employees with the technological means, both in terms of hardware and specific software to be able to WFH (Belzunegui-Eraso & Erro-Garcés, 2020).

Limitations and Future Research
One obvious limitation of our findings is that they were based on self-perceptions-which may differ from objective changes in leadership behaviors. Future research may wish to remedy this limitation. At the same time, it will be rather difficult to mimic the simultaneous changes of the two real-world shocks that are central to our paper, WHF and COVID-19, using a research design that focuses on actual behaviors only. A second limitation is that one would like to disentangle the effects on perceptions of behaviors due to the WFH change, from those that stem from the COVID-19 crisis. For example, one possible effect could be that managers find it difficult to delegate responsibilities at the start of this COVID-19 crisis (when we collected our data), but might become more experienced in showing such behavior later on, for example, in the second half of 2020, when WFH became more normal, and the threat of the COVID-19 crisis became less. Future research should look into this matter, by comparing leadership responses at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, as we do here, with responses later on. It would also be interesting to investigate the separate effects of the COVID-19 crisis and WFH if over time, hopefully, the threat of the crisis wears off and organizations are left (only) with the WFH legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the latter case, WFH would again become more of a deliberate organizational choice and one could investigate whether or not the effects that our study finds for the WFH change in the wake of the initial lockdown decision persist. Research by Barrero et al. (2020), for instance, finds that U.S. workers who face "mandatory" WFH because of the COVID-19 crisis, would prefer to continue to work significantly more from home once the COVID-19 crisis has been resolved. Finally, our sample consists of 748 highly educated Dutch employees. Future research should also look into the relationship between WFH on the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis for different institutional settings and samples.


Determinants of People’s Secondary Hazards Risk Perception: A Case Study in Wenchuan Earthquake Disaster Areas of China

Few studies have examined people’s subjective perceptions of risk after secondary disasters. This study selected 12 towns in the areas where secondary geological hazards (SGH) occurred after the Wenchuan earthquake as the survey research areas and obtained a total of 957 valid samples to assess the risk perceptions of residents and the factors influencing them 10 years after the disaster. Using four indicators (possibility, awareness, apprehension, and impact) to construct the Resident Risk Perception Index (RRPI), the results show that residents in the affected areas have high, moderate, and low-risk perceptions of SGH at 27.59, 48.38, and 24.03% respectively. The study found that people who suffered in the past from geological disasters had a higher risk perception. Perceptions of secondary geological hazard risk varied significantly with age, education, marital status, and experience. It was also found that residents in the 30–40 age group have the highest risk perception, young people in the 20–30 age group have the highest risk awareness, and older people over 60 are more fearful of SGH. The study recommends awareness campaigns and adequate disaster preparedness exercises to improve the risk perception of local people, especially to foster ownership of learning about disasters among residents.

INTRODUCTION
Since the 20th century, major sudden natural disasters such as earthquakes (Tsai and Chen, 2011), tsunamis (Suppasri et al., 2013), volcanic eruptions (Muir et al., 2020), floods (Salvucci and Santos, 2020), and tornados (Silver and Grek-Martin, 2015) have occurred frequently and have become important factors affecting national economies and sustainable development (Park and Reisinger, 2010). Human casualties and damage to material property caused by disasters have increased significantly worldwide (O'Keefe et al., 1976) and the international community has faced unprecedented challenges (Lippi et al., 2010;Thomas et al., 2014). According to the EM-DAT Database (EM-DAT, 2022), there were 1,628 cases of natural disasters worldwide in the last 5 years (1 January 2017-1 January 2022).
The first rule of thumb in dealing with disasters is to avoid harm, and the perception of risk is a prerequisite. However, disaster risk has not been significantly reduced as a result of socioeconomic development (IPCC, 2012). Without a proper risk perception assessment, individuals may not understand the importance of mitigating these risks (Bier, 2001). Understanding individual perceptions of risk in disaster-prone areas will assist in developing and implementing risk management measures and planning for the full disaster management cycle (Parsizadeh et al., 2015;Raikes et al., 2019). Regarding the definition of risk perception, some scholars believe that risk perception is people's awareness and understanding of the relevant characteristics of a risky thing and that it is a subjective judgement made by people about the characteristics and severity of a particular risk (Adomah Bempah and Olav Øyhus, 2017;Ullah et al., 2020). It has also been argued that risk perception is a kind of risk cognitive thinking based on an intuitive sensory experience model (Savadori et al., 2004) and is a key factor to encourage protective actions in natural disaster situations (Lindell and Perry, 2000). Psychologically, disaster risk perception is conditioned by factors internal to the individual and is sensitive to shocks and perturbations in the external environment (Gold, 1980). Existing research has envisaged the interaction between society and the environment, where the perceived environment is the primary basis for human decision-making in the process of human-environment interactions (Burton and Kates, 1964;Hewitt and Burton, 1971). Since risk perception comes from people's subjective judgment, there is often a gap between it and the objective real risk. Extensive and intensive coverage of disaster occurrence and damage may enhance people's judgment of the likelihood of a disaster occurring and the severity of its consequences, causing excessive risk perception (Slovic, 2000;Perlaviciute et al., 2017). However, lack of disaster information or asymmetry in information acquisition can lead to low levels of risk perception (Nahayo et al., 2017;Netzel et al., 2021).
The Wenchuan earthquake in 2008 caused widespread concern around the world. According to Chen et al. (2012), 69,227 people died, 374,643 were injured, and 17,923 were missing in this magnitude 8.0 earthquake. Approximately 7,967,000 buildings were completely demolished and 24,543,000 were damaged (The National Almanac of China, 2009), and the affected population was 462,400,002 (Yang et al., 2014). As the earthquake occurred in a mountainous area, more than 15,000 secondary geological hazards (SGH) occurred in a short period, including landslides, landslips, dammed lakes, and debris flows (Yin et al., 2009). The deaths and injuries caused by this earthquake brought more shocking concerns, but the devastating SGH that accompany it cannot be ignored as well. From 2010 to 2018, approximately 244 million people in China were affected by natural disasters, which included 117,299 secondary geological disasters (Xue et al., 2021). These SGH substantially increased the human, social and economic impact of the earthquake (Huang et al., 2012).
Existing studies have done extensive research on human risk perception of original natural hazards, but have mostly focused on developed countries (Lindell et al., 2016;Doyle et al., 2018), while risk perception of secondary hazards has been less studied, and a few scholars have explored the livelihood resilience of farm households in secondary hazard-prone areas (Yang et al., 2021). Therefore, the risk perceptions of residents may differ in researches comparing mountainous and non-mountainous areas and original and secondary hazards. China is a mountainous country, with 70% of its hilly settlements being concentrated residential areas for China's poor population. Frequent geological disasters in mountainous areas hinder the process of poverty alleviation and prosperity in China . Data show that the local poverty rate rose from 30% to over 60% after the Wenchuan earthquake (Xinhua News Agency, 2009). The mountain settlements, especially the rural settlements in areas threatened by earthquake hazards (including SGH), are a special group and require special attention Qing et al., 2021). In 2020, China attained a complete victory in the fight against poverty and scored decisive achievements in securing a full victory in building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. How to prevent a return to poverty, the risk perception of natural disasters among vulnerable groups deserves our attention even more. In this study, twelve townships in the three severely affected counties of the Wenchuan earthquake were selected as the study area and a questionnaire survey was conducted among the residents of the area with the following objectives: 1) Exploring the general and specific concerns of residents in rural disaster areas regarding SGH. 2) Assessing the perception ability of residents in rural disaster areas to the risk of SGH. 3) Studying the factors influencing the SGH perception among residents in rural disaster areas. 4) Examining the impact of key factors on SGH perceptions in a group of rural disaster area residents.

LITERATURE REVIEW AND RESEARCH HYPOTHESES
The concept of risk perception is derived from psychology and was first studied in the field of consumer behavior. With the socio-economic development, risk perception has also been gradually applied to the fields such as insurance and disaster science. Scholars have explored extensively the risk perceptions of different groups in response to different hazards, and the results show many differences and similarities (Walshe et al., 2018;Sun and Sun, 2019), but few studies have examined people's subjective perceptions of risk after secondary disasters. This study investigates the correlations and variations between disaster experiences, personal characteristics, risk communication, and disaster risk perception of residents in disaster areas, in the hope of improving the ability of residents in disaster areas to cope with SGH and thus enhance disaster prevention and mitigation. Many studies have shown that disaster experience is an important factor in shaping risk perception (Bustillos Ardaya et al., 2017;Sun and Han, 2018;Venable et al., 2020). Disaster experience directly or indirectly influences residents' perceptions of disaster risk (Tian et al., 2014), and individuals with sufficient disaster experience have an immediate understanding of the disaster situations (Hong et al., 2019). Most research results show that residents' disaster experience is positively significantly correlated with their disaster risk perception (Lo and Cheung, 2015;Xu et al., 2019a). Some scholars also argued that experience is not found to be one of the strongest correlates with perceived risk (Champ and Brenkert-Smith, 2016). Faced with the threat of disaster, the likelihood of a disaster (Yang et al., 2020), the geographical location of the disaster (Scolobig et al., 2012), and whether the affected population is evacuated (Bromet et al., 2011) all contribute to the public's different perceptions of risk. Residents of vulnerable areas generally lack the capacity needed to acquire disaster knowledge and skills (Xu et al., 2019b). Residents living in convenient geographic locations have easier access to a variety of market and technology information, so the response capability of these residents may be stronger (Zhang et al., 2012). Based on this, this study proposes hypothesis 1: H1: Respondents' experience of disasters and the severity of the disaster were positively correlated with disaster risk perception.
In addition, personal characteristics still play an important role in impacting people's risk perception. In particular, gender, age, and educational level are the three most common indicators. However, different studies give different results. Some studies show that the severe disaster had more impact on vulnerable populations such as females, children, and lowincome people (Huang et al., 2014). Females show greater fear and worry compared to males (Chen et al., 2020). Risk perception was higher among female respondents than among male respondents (Zhang and Fan, 2013). Young people's perception of disaster risk is higher than that of the elderly . The awareness, knowledge, and perception are higher among educated people and people having social interaction (Barua et al., 2020). An individual's socioeconomic status will have an underlying impact on disaster awareness and information-seeking behavior. For non-low socioeconomic status population groups, females show higher levels of risk awareness (Teo et al., 2018). However, other studies give conflicting results. For instance, household income and household composition do not seem to impact risk perception measures (Vásquez et al., 2018). Other studies have found that people with religious beliefs can enhance social cohesion and contribute to coping with fear and uncertainty caused by disasters (Sherry and Curtis, 2017). But non-religious people know better the protocols to follow in the event of disasters than the religious population (Ponce-Pacheco et al., 2021). Besides, some studies have made risk perception assessments on race (Senkbeil et al., 2014), public trust (Su et al., 2017), and participation in disaster-related training (Hajito et al., 2015). Economic development, socio-political systems, historical and cultural backgrounds will also influence the public's perception of risk (Zhong and Guo, 2015). Based on this, the following hypothesis 2 is made: H2: Personal characteristics such as household structure, health status, educational background, and age of the respondents have a significant impact on their capacity to cope with disasters. However, the directions of these relationships are unknown.
On the other hand, a growing number of scholars believe that social media, information exchange, the mastery of disaster knowledge, and other communication factors have a profound impact on risk perception. Media exposure plays an invaluable role in informing residents about disasters . New media users can clearly understand the severity of disasters (Geng et al., 2021). Social media provides an invaluable source of data and warnings in case of disasters (Zhang et al., 2019), and can effectively facilitate crisis communication and attain situational awareness (Ogie et al., 2018). But at the peak of a disaster, the public prefers to trust information released by the government than the mass media because it is more officially reliable . It has been shown that the greater the access to disaster information, the lower the public's fear level and the greater the overall impact of risk perception (Shen et al., 2020). The lower the perception of disaster risk among those who do not know the causes of disasters (Botzen et al., 2009). Neighbors may have a strong influence on risk perception (Champ and Brenkert-Smith, 2016). For disaster knowledge, some results show that appropriate education can reduce students' fear of disasters (Yoshida et al., 2020). Among the student community, high school students have poor risk perceptions of natural hazards (Khan et al., 2020a) and demonstrate the need to incorporate earthquake risk education into the school curriculum as a first step in reducing the impact of future earthquake hazards (Baytiyeh and Ocal, 2016). residents in rural areas tend to overestimate disaster risks due to a lack of scientific knowledge, which indicates that increases in disaster preparedness can reduce the apprehensions of disasters among the masses (Khan et al., 2020b). Based on this, the following hypothesis 3 is made for this study: H3: Information exchange and media exposure have a positive impact on disaster risk perception.

Sampling and Data Collection Process
This study selected 12 towns in three counties where SGH occurred after the Wenchuan earthquake as the survey research areas ( Figure 1) and used two forms of household visits and centralized point visits to conduct questionnaire surveys to obtain data. The survey randomly selects residents between 20 and 80 years old to fill out the questionnaire. During the investigation, if an interviewee with a low education level, illiteracy, or difficulty in answering the questionnaire is encountered, the interviewer helped to fill in the questionnaire according to the interviewee's true Frontiers in Earth Science | www.frontiersin.org March 2022 | Volume 10 | Article 865143 meaning. A total of 1,000 questionnaires were distributed and 957 valid questionnaires were returned, with a validity rate of 95.7%. The specific number of valid questionnaires for each township is shown in Figure 2. Figure 3 illustrates part of the interviews conducted by the research team during the field research in Beichuan and Wenchuan counties. Among them, Figure 3A shows the large mudslide in Chenjiaba, Figure 3B shows the landslide prevention actions in Chenjiaba, and Figure 3C and Figure 3D show the field research and the site where the questionnaire was done.

Risk Perception Measure
Disaster risk perception refers to the process in which individuals make subjective judgments on the characteristics and severity of disaster risks (Peng et al., 2017). By combing the existing literature (Xu et al., 2018;Qing et al., 2021), this study intended to measure the level of disaster risk perception of residents in disaster areas from four dimensions: "possibility," "awareness," "apprehension," "impact". The "possibility" indicator reflects an individual's assessment of the likelihood of a disaster occurring (Kellens et al., 2013;Lawrence et al., 2014;Xu et al., 2016). The "awareness" indicator reflects whether an individual is aware of the SGH (Grothmann and Reusswig, 2006;Ho et al., 2008). The "apprehension" indicator describes the extent to which an individual is afraid of a disaster Armas et al., 2017). The "impact" indicator indicates the extent to which people in the disaster area perceive the damage to their personal property and person caused by the disaster (Keown, 2010;Sun and Xue, 2020). The evaluation method of each indicator adopts a Likert scale (1-5 options) and single-choice form, allowing respondents to choose corresponding options based on their subjective judgments. The risk perception measures are shown in Table 1. The mean values of the four dimensions are 2.86, 2.13, 2.10, and 1.87, respectively, and the level of risk perception is basically at the middle level. They were more likely to agree that SGH causes personal and property damage (mean = 1.87), and their perception of concern for changes in the surrounding geological environment was the least different (standard deviation = 0.85).

Selection of Independent Variables
This study classified the influences into disaster experience, individual characteristics, and risk communication factors.
According to the characteristics of the Wenchuan earthquakestricken area, we adopted gender, age, marital status, education level, family monthly income, and health status as control variables to measure personal characteristics. In this study, the frequency, impact, and damage caused by SGH were included in the indicator system, and five variables were selected to measure risk communication ( Table 2).

Risk Perception Index
The risk perception level was measured through a three-digit Likert scale. 1 represents the option of "strongly agree" or "agree" on the four-dimensional Likert scale, 2 represents the option of "neutral", and 3 represents the option of "disagree" or "strongly disagree". A resident risk perception index (RRPI) was constructed and used to assess the resident risk perception to geohazards. The RRPI can be expressed by Where s i and w i are the standardized data and the weight value of the index i, respectively. s ij is the average value of the j th option of the indicator i th . The RRPI was a relative measure of geohazards risk perception for each resident, and in this study, the lower the value of RRPI, the higher the level of geohazards risk perception.
Here, each indicator should be considered to have the same contribution (w i = 1) to the population's perception of geohazard risk (Cutter et al., 2003;Liu et al., 2018).

Socioeconomic Characteristics
From the valid sample, the ratio of men to women is 43.68-56.32, of which 91.75% are married and 4.18% are unmarried. The age distribution of the total sample was predominantly 40 years old, accounting for 77.95%. The respondents in good health or general health accounted for 63.43%, and very poor health accounted for 11.60%. Among the interviewees, ethnic minorities account for 57.37%, and the Han nationality accounts for 42.63%. The proportion of interviewees from urban and rural areas is 24.66-75.34. Respondents have a low monthly income. Among the urban household registration respondents, 67.82% of the residents had a monthly income of less than 4,000 yuan, and among the rural household registration respondents, the figure was 82.18%. The majority of the respondents were from lowincome groups. The overall level of education of the respondents was low, with 3.87% of the respondents reported to be illiterate. The majority of respondents had a middle school education level (nearly half), followed by a primary education level (32.08%).

Descriptive Statistics of Risk Perception Indicators
The four dimensions risk perception level was measured through a five-digit Likert scale. When respondents were asked if major SGH would occur in the future, 30.41% of respondents perceived "agree", followed by "disagree" (28.63%), and "neutral" (25.29%). When asked if they are always aware of geological changes in their surroundings, more than half of the respondents "agree" (57.68%) and a further 19.75% "strongly agree". Among the 957 respondents, nearly half (42.53%) expressed great fear of SGH (strongly agree), and 22.36% chose "agree". The majority of respondents strongly agreed (44.93%) or agreed (24.56%) that SGH can cause damage to personal property or security. More people (43.26% "disagree" and 5.85% "strongly disagree") do not think that there will be a larger earthquake in the future compared to a secondary geological hazard. A larger proportion of people strongly agreed that earthquakes cause damage to personal property and safety (52.98%) as well as being very fearful of earthquakes (53.40%).

Measurement of Resident Risk Perception Index
The scores of RRPI were initially calculated using an additive model (Eq. 1). The RRPI scores were divided into three grades using the mean value (MV) and standard deviation (SD) of RRPI  scores. If the RRPI score was greater than 1 SD from the MV [(RRPI score) > (MV + 1 SD)], the geohazards risk perception of residents was in a low category, if the RRPI score was lower than 1 SD from the MV [(RRPI score) < (MV − 1 SD)], the geohazards risk perception of residents was in the high category and other RRPI scores [(MV − 1 SD) ≤ (RRPI score) ≤ (MV + 1 SD)] were in the moderate category (Liu and Li, 2016). In this study, the SD, MV, maximum and minimum values of RRPI scores were 1.82, 6.08, 12, and 4, respectively. Therefore, the ranges of the high, moderate, and low categories of risk perception for residents were (4, 4.26), (4.26, 7.90), and (7.90, 12), respectively. The results show (Figure 4) that nearly half of the respondents (48.38%) have moderate disaster risk perception, only 27.59% have a high perception of geohazard risk, and still, nearly a quarter of the respondents have low-risk perception. Furthermore, among the four dimensions affecting risk perception, the mean scores of possibilities, awareness, apprehension, and impact were 1.92, 1.32, 1.52, and 1.32, respectively.

Influencing Factors of Risk Perception
As can be seen from Figure 5, the disaster experience has had a considerable impact on the risk perceptions of residents in the affected areas. Overall, residents who have experienced more large-scale SGH since the Wenchuan earthquake have a higher risk perception, and those who experience ten or more large-scale SGH per year have the highest risk perception. For the question on the impact of SGH, more affected residents had a higher perception of risk than those who were less affected, with the largest number of residents (39.39%) being very affected. The highest risk perceptions were found among those who answered "large impact". The majority of residents (44.20%) suffered a financial loss of RMB 20,000 to 30,000 in SGH, with those who did not suffer a financial loss having the highest perception of risk.
Differences in personal characteristics can likewise lead to differences in the risk perceptions of residents in the affected areas ( Figure 6). This study found that men were more aware than women and that women were more fearful and apprehensive than men. Overall, risk perceptions were higher among females than males in the study area. In terms of age, middle-aged people in their 40 and 50s have the highest risk perception, older people Whether the location has a special prevention team of SGH (1 = yes, 2 = no, 3 = don't know) 1.57 0.76 C11: The number of local publicities for SGH (1 = a great many-5 = none) 2.90 1.01 C12: The number of local disaster prevention drills organized by the masses (1 = a great many-5 = none) 4.30 1.12 C13: Understanding of SGH (1 = totally know-5 = totally unknown) 2.57 0.87 C14: Will you take the initiative to learn the knowledge related to SGH (1 = yes, 2 = no) 1.53 0.50 a SD = standard deviation. b 1 = ten times a year and above, 2 = seven to nine times a year, 3 = four to six times a year, 4 = one to three times a year, 5 = none. c 1 = Very large, 2 = large, 3 = general, 4 = small, 5 = no direct impact. d 1 = more than 40,000 Yuan, 2 = 30,000 to 40,000 Yuan, 3 = 20,000 to 30,000 Yuan, 4 = less than 20,000 Yuan, 5 = none. e 1 = 61-80 years old, 2 = 51-60 years old, 3 = 41-50 years old, 4 = 31-40 years old, 5 = 20-30 years old. f 1 = more than 10,000 Yuan, 2 = 7,001 to 10,000 Yuan, 3 = 4,001 to 7,000 Yuan, 4 = 3,001 to 4,000 Yuan, 5 = less than 3,000 Yuan.

FIGURE 4 | Comparison based on risk perception (RRPI).
Frontiers in Earth Science | www.frontiersin.org March 2022 | Volume 10 | Article 865143 over 60 have the highest perception of apprehension, and younger people in their 20 and 30s have the highest perception of awareness. Of all groups, the perceived risk is highest for those who are widowed, followed by those who are married. In terms of education, the majority of respondents had a primary (32.08%) or secondary (47.54%) level of education, and we found that the perception of disaster risk was highest among respondents with primary school education. In terms of economic level, households with higher incomes were more risk-perceptive than those with lower incomes, and the lowest income group of all respondents was similarly more riskperceptive. Respondents whose health status differs significantly compared to their peers are more risk perceptive. In terms of risk communication (Figure 7), respondents with a dedicated geohazard prevention team in their place of residence have a higher risk perception, and they generally have a higher risk awareness and a higher sensitivity to hazards. Over half of the respondents (59.87%) have such a disaster prevention team in their local area. From the government's point of view, if the local government publicizes SGH enough times, it will make the residents have a high perception of risk. If the government organizes enough disaster prevention drills for the public, it will likewise help improve the public's risk perception. Unfortunately, however, the majority of respondents (67.50%) indicated that they had not conducted such an exercise. From an individual perspective, if residents have more knowledge or information about the relevant SGH, they have a better understanding of the risk and have a higher risk perception. Interestingly, the study also found that residents who actively learn about SGH have a higher perception of risk, at 46.67%.

DISCUSSION
The Wenchuan earthquake had a huge impact on people's daily lives and psychology, with far-reaching effects. What's more, it made residents worry and fear about the SGH that accompanied the earthquake. Exploring the risk perception of SGH among residents in affected areas can help improve their resilience, which is important for avoiding or mitigating secondary damage in the affected areas. However, few studies have focused on residents' perceptions of SGH. The marginal contribution of this study is that the empirical study is used to analyze the relationship between disaster experience, personal and household characteristics, risk communication, and the perceived risk level of SGH. The results of the current study have some similarities and differences with existing studies. On the other hand, the subjects selected for this study are rural residents who are frequently threatened by secondary hazards and are vulnerable due to their resource endowments, which have received less attention in previous studies. In areas where megaearthquakes have occurred, it is common sense that residents should have a high perception of SGH, but this is not the case.
During the long-term study and follow-up of the affected areas, the research team found that despite the experience of the megaearthquake, only 27.59% of respondents in the study area had a high perception of SGH, and still almost a quarter of residents (24.03%) had a low perception of risk. When confronted with the same hazards and environmental changes, some inhabitants are more psychologically vulnerable due to their inability to perceive risks and adapt to changes in time and are helpless to deal with the SGH that arises, while others are the opposite. One of the main reasons for this is that different individuals have different sensitivities to hazards and environmental changes, and different factors influence risk perception. Perceptions are differentiated and such discrepancy is an important factor in shaping different disaster prevention and mitigation decisions. It follows that understanding people's perceptions of disasters is the primary basis for a deeper understanding of their adaptation to disasters.
This study finds that residents' risk perceptions are strongly influenced and varied by disaster experiences, individual characteristics, and risk communication factors in 12 study areas where SGH had occurred. Consistent with Hypothesis 1, the number of SGH experienced by residents since the Wenchuan earthquake was positively correlated with residents' risk perception ability, that is, the more the number of SGH experienced, the higher the risk perception ability, which is similar to previous studies (McClure et al., 2015;Xu et al., 2016;Cui and Han, 2019;Xu et al., 2020). Disasters cause loss of life and property as well as inconvenience to residents, so they are more able to imagine the emotional distress and personal loss caused by such a disaster (Siegrist and Gutscher, 2008). However, this does not mean that governments can relax their vigilance in low-risk areas, as Tian et al. (2014) argue that people who suffer more from disasters tend to be less sensitive to them, which means that governments should equally strengthen disaster awareness and risk communication in risk-prone and low-risk areas. In addition, this study finds that most of the study participants are middle-aged and the elderly and live in mountainous areas, and are unwilling to relocate due to oldfashioned thinking. When the disaster came, most of them suffered economic losses (84.8%). However, residents who did not suffer property damage had the highest risk perception. Perhaps this is because most people are more familiar and knowledgeable about SGH after experiencing financial losses, and show less apprehension and awareness of SGH. As mentioned by Mileti and Darlington (1995), whereas 80% of respondents in an earthquake risk zone believed an earthquake would occur where they lived in the next 5 years, most judged that they would not suffer injuries or loss to their property. At this point, people in the risk zones believe they will suffer less harm in a disaster than other citizens, showing relative optimism and less fear (Helweg-Larsen 1999). Similarly, Alam (2020b) study shows that even though many residents are located in high-risk areas and have observed damage caused by landslides in their immediate area, they still consider that their area is safe for living and they are at low risk. Therefore, psychosocial aspects of the community should also be included in the risk management system.
This study finds that most of the indicators of personal and household characteristics have a significant effect on the risk perception rating, which is partially consistent with Hypothesis 2. Among them, women have a higher risk perception of SGH than men, which is consistent with the findings of Kung and Chen (2012). However, the results in this study show little variation by gender, possibly because almost everyone in this small study area has experienced SGH, and this general phenomenon has resulted in a similar sensitivity to risk between men and women. Some scholars also hold contradictory views, such as Zhou et al. (2012), who argue that women have weaker perceived risk. Zhong and Guo (2015) state that there is no significant difference in risk perception by gender. This may be due to the different regions, dimensions, items, variables, and different types of hazards. In contrast, other individual characteristics have a greater impact on risk perception. In terms of age, some scholars believed that age is positively correlated with risk perception (Lindell and Hwang, 2008), although negative outcomes have also been found (Kellens et al., 2013). we found that middle-aged people in their 40 and 50s have the highest perception of risk. Education is also an important factor in perceived disaster risk, and the majority of respondents in this study had primary or secondary education, where educated respondents had significantly higher risk perceptions than uneducated ones, and our findings are consistent with those of Rahman (2019). A particular finding of this study is that respondents with primary education almost always live and work locally, are very familiar with their surroundings, and almost always live halfway up the mountain, whereas most respondents with secondary and post-secondary education chose to go out for work Zhuang et al., 2020), are less familiar with the local geological environment than residents at home and have home addresses mostly near river valleys. Respondents with primary education, therefore, had the highest perception of risk. However, it has also been argued that well-educated people will believe that disasters are acts of God and will go beyond our imagination to prevent them, which can make such groups lack awareness of impending disasters (Bhandari et al., 2021). The perception of the disaster was more pronounced among the widowed, who had already lost their partner in the disaster, followed by the married, who had more complex financial and interpersonal relationships and in most cases would take into account the family situation, similar to the results of existing studies (Sun and Han, 2018;Xue et al., 2021). For low-income residents, who are less well off, show more fear and concern about SGH and are more in agreement that SGH can cause loss of life and property, which is consistent with existing research findings (Xue et al., 2021).
Risk communication is considered to be an essential factor in assessing disaster risk perception and can help citizens understand disaster risks associated with environmental hazards and promote community engagement . Consistent with Hypothesis 3, this study finds that the dissemination of disaster knowledge can further enhance residents' awareness of worry, preparedness, and responsibility, which in turn improves their risk perception. Specific emergency drills and disaster prevention education can raise residents' awareness of disaster prevention and mitigation, improve emergency avoidance, self-protection, and self-rescue capabilities. Xu et al. (2020) and Zhuang et al. (2020) find that residents of disaster threatened areas in China mainly obtain disaster information through traditional media channels (mainly television and mobile phones), with relatives and friends also being important sources of information. Kao et al. (2017) also mention that pre-disaster preparedness in daily life ensures that an appropriate emergency response is executed in the event of a disaster. Emergency drill training allows the public to gain experience and familiarize themselves with how to find the correct escape routes and evacuation sites, enhancing their ability to deal with natural disaster emergencies and thus their disaster risk perception. These findings are similar to existing studies (Huang et al., 2020;Wei et al., 2020). This study finds that the way residents obtain and interpret relevant information significantly affects disaster risk perceptions, that is, risk perception is higher for those who actively learn SGH or know more about SGH (Only three people had no knowledge of SGH at all and were excluded from the analysis because of the small sample size), and knowing more disaster information can help residents overcome psychological panic when facing risk events. Research by Alcántara-Ayala and  suggests that without access to information, people tend to underestimate the possibility of disasters and do not realize the need to understand the risks and take protective measures.
This study aims to protect human life and property via disaster risk reduction to achieve sustainable development of human society. The results of the study can provide theoretical references for disaster risk management in the vast SHG-prone areas in China. As mentioned by Alam (2020a), research on risk hazards will contribute to the development and implementation of effective peoplecentered disaster risk reduction strategies and disaster governance. There are still some limitations in this study. Due to time constraints, this study was unable to dynamically monitor the risk perceptions of residents in the extremely hard-hit areas of the Wenchuan earthquake, and we will continue to track the risk perceptions of rural residents for SGH in the future to explore the differences in the changes of residents' perceptions of disaster risks under various impact conditions. In addition, this study is aimed at rural residents living in mountainous areas and may include consideration of urban residents in the future.

CONCLUSION AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS
We believe that assessing the perception of SGH among residents in the Wenchuan earthquake-affected areas can provide local governments with decision-making options regarding future disaster prevention and mitigation in rural areas, as well as for keeping residents in the affected areas out of the plight of returning to poverty. This study constructed a resident risk perception index using four indicators (possibility, awareness, apprehension, and impact) and found that: 1) In SGH-prone areas, residents have a higher risk perception of SGH (high-risk perception rate of 27.59%) compared to original hazards like earthquakes (high-risk perception rate of 17.66%), and nearly half have a moderate risk perception of SGH (48.38%). 2) Residents have less fear of SGH than earthquakes and believe that SGH has less of an impact than earthquakes. Most people do not believe that earthquakes will occur in the future, but are more likely to experience SGH. 3) Disaster experience is positively correlated with risk perception ability. In addition to gender, personal and household characteristics had a significant effect on risk perception ability. In addition, risk communication and information exchange have a positive impact on disaster risk perception.
Reducing the risk of SGH in rural areas helps to promote sustainable development in rural areas. This study also has certain policy implications. First, the government should pay more attention to vulnerable groups, especially the uneducated elderly, and should use various channels to inform the public of all types of disasters promptly and ensure the accuracy, timeliness, and transparency of information delivery. Second, the authorities should enhance health education on disaster risks, especially SGH, to improve residents' risk response capabilities, as most people indicated that they do not actively learn or understand information on SGH. Third, the authorities should regularly conduct disaster prevention exercises for relevant types of disasters to effectively raise the awareness, knowledge, and skills of residents, as the more experienced people, are in disasters, the higher their risk perception is. Fourth, the authorities need to establish a disaster risk early warning management system to detect and identify signs of disaster risk at an early stage and set up a working group on geohazard prevention and control to conduct regular and irregular hazard screening.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/Supplementary Material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

ETHICS STATEMENT
The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Chengdu University of Technology. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.