![]() More specifically, existing knowledge on remote working has mostly been generated from a context in which remote working was only occasionally or infrequently practiced, and was only considered by some, but not all or most, of the workers within an organization. At the least, we need to investigate how this context has shaped the experience of working remotely. However, due to the fact that almost none of those studies was conducted at a time when remote working was practiced at such an unprecedented scale as it has been during the pandemic, coupled with unique demands at this time, some of the previously accumulated knowledge on remote working might lack contextual relevance in the current COVID‐19 crisis. ![]() Remote working has become the “new normal,” almost overnight.Īs management scholars, we might assume that we already have a sufficient evidence base to understand the psychological challenges or risks that remote workers are facing during the pandemic, given the large body of research on remote working (e.g., Grant et al., 2013 Konradt et al., 2003). Now, the unprecedented outbreak of the COVID‐19 pandemic in 2020 has required millions of people across the world into being remote workers, inadvertently leading to a de facto global experiment of remote working (Kniffin et al., 2020). Remote working has, in fact, been a “luxury for the relatively affluent” (Desilver, 2020), such as higher‐income earners (e.g., over 75% of employees who work from home have an annual earning above $65,000) and white‐collar workers (e.g., over 40% of teleworkers are executives, managers, or professionals).īecause of this situation, prior to COVID‐19, most workers had little remote working experience nor were they or their organizations prepared for supporting this practice. Even in Europe, only around 2 percent of employees teleworked mainly from home in 2015 (Eurofound, 2017). Although the recent American Community Survey (2017) showed that the number of US employees who worked from home at least half of the time grew from 1.8 million in 2005 to 3.9 million in 2017, remote working at that time was just 2.9 percent of the total US workforce. However, prior to the pandemic, remote working was not a widely used practice (Kossek & Lautsch, 2018). ![]() Remote working is defined as “a flexible work arrangement whereby workers work in locations, remote from their central offices or production facilities, the worker has no personal contact with co‐workers there, but is able to communicate with them using technology” (Di Martino & Wirth, 1990, p. We discuss the implications of our research for the pandemic and beyond.Īs information and communication technologies (ICTs) have advanced in their capabilities, and especially with the greater availability of high‐speed internet, remote working (also referred to as teleworking, telecommuting, distributed work, or flexible work arrangements Allen et al., 2015) has grown in its use as a new mode of work in the past several decades. Self‐discipline was a significant moderator of several of these relationships. ![]() Specifically, social support was positively correlated with lower levels of all remote working challenges job autonomy negatively related to loneliness workload and monitoring both linked to higher work‐home interference and workload additionally linked to lower procrastination. In Study 2, using survey data from 522 employees working at home during the pandemic, we found that virtual work characteristics linked to worker's performance and well‐being via the experienced challenges. In Study 1, from semi‐structured interviews with Chinese employees working from home in the early days of the pandemic, we identified four key remote work challenges (work‐home interference, ineffective communication, procrastination, and loneliness), as well as four virtual work characteristics that affected the experience of these challenges (social support, job autonomy, monitoring, and workload) and one key individual difference factor (workers’ self‐discipline). ![]() We conducted a mixed‐methods investigation to explore the challenges experienced by remote workers at this time, as well as what virtual work characteristics and individual differences affect these challenges. Existing knowledge on remote working can be questioned in an extraordinary pandemic context. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |