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Prior research has extensively examined how bringing technology from work into the non-work life domain creates conflict, yet the reverse pathway has rarely been studied. The purpose of this study is to bridge this gap and examine how the non-work use of smartphones in the workplace affects work–life conflict.

Drawing from three literature streams: technostress, work–life conflict and role boundary theory, the authors theorise on how limiting employees' ability to integrate the personal life domain into work, by means of technology use policy, contributes to stress and work–life conflict. To test this model, the authors employ a natural experiment in a company that changed its policy from fully restricting to open smartphone access for non-work purposes in the workplace. The insights gained from the experiment were explored further through qualitative interviews.

Work–life conflict declines when a ban on using smartphones for non-work purposes in the workplace is revoked. This study's results show that the relationship between smartphone use in the workplace and work–life conflict is mediated by sensed stress. Additionally, a post-hoc analysis reveals that work performance was unchanged when the smartphone ban was revoked.

First, this study advances the authors' understanding of how smartphone use policies in the workplace spill over to affect non-work life. Second, this work contributes to the technostress literature by revealing how, in specific situations, engagement with ICT can reduce distress and strain.

Drawing on social support theory, this study empirically investigates the relationship between family-supportive supervisor behaviours (FSSBs) and the family cohesion of employees in the presence of job crafting as a mediator and passion for work as a moderator.

This study uses a structural equation modelling technique on three-wave, time-lagged primary data (N = 305) collected from employees of service sector firms in Pakistan.

The results reveal that FSSBs enhance the family cohesion of employees through the underlying mechanism of job crafting. Using passion for work as a moderator, the conditional analysis shows that the link between FSSBs and job crafting becomes stronger in the presence of high passion for work.

This study extends the literature on the link between FSSBs and job crafting and provides insightful theoretical contributions. This study advances social support theory by providing support for and detailing practical implications of promoting FSSBs, thus enhancing the understanding of the positive impact of job crafting behaviours across non-work spheres.

This study aims to investigate whether and how artificial intelligence (AI) awareness affects work withdrawal.

This survey garners participation from a total of 305 hotel employees in China. The proposed hypotheses are examined using Hayes’s PROCESS macro.

The results indicate that AI awareness could positively affect work withdrawal. Negative work-related rumination and emotional exhaustion respectively mediate this relationship. Furthermore, negative work-related rumination and emotional exhaustion act as chain mediators between AI awareness and work withdrawal.

Given the growing adoption of AI technology in the hospitality industry, it is imperative that managers intensify their scrutiny of the psychological changes experienced by frontline service employees and allocate more resources to mitigating the impact of AI on their work withdrawal.

This study contributes to the burgeoning literature on AI by elucidating the chain mediating roles of negative work-related rumination and emotional exhaustion. It also makes a significant forward in examining mediating mechanisms, notably the chain-mediated mechanism, through which AI awareness impacts employee outcomes.

This study aims to investigate whether social media use (SMU) at work has a curvilinear effect on job performance and whether Cyberloafing (non-work-related use) and job complexity moderate this effect.

Online surveys were conducted in China among WeChat users from multiple organizations working in the office environment, generating 350 valid responses.

The results revealed that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between SMU at work and job performance through mediations of communication, information sharing and entertainment; such that the relationship is initially positive but becomes weaker as SMU increases and exceeds the optimal level. Notably, it is found that Cyberloafing negatively moderates the relationship between SMU and job performance, and there is a significant joint moderating effect of job complexity and Cyberloafing.

This study improves the research of information system use. It also provides implications for organizations concerned about formulating policies related to individuals' SMU and suggests that SM users and managers should find strategies to arrive at without surpassing the optimal level to maximize productivity.

This paper enriches the job demands-resources model to extend the literature on the advantages and disadvantages of SMU at work, which indirectly affect performance through two job conditions (job resources and demands). The study finds that employees benefit from a moderate amount of SMU at work, once it surpasses the optimal level, job demands surpass job resources and counterproductivity will appear. In addition, Cyberloafing and job complexity moderate the optimal level of SMU at work, which have not yet been investigated.

Based on the resource-gain-development framework, this study aims to explore the mediating mechanism of work–family enrichment (WFE) and psychological distress, and the potential positive effect of co-worker support, on employees’ work behaviour.

Data was obtained via a three-stage survey with 400 frontline employees from 13 distinct industries.

This study found that family-supportive leadership (FSL) has a positive impact on employees’ taking charge behaviour (TCB). WFE and psychological distress partially mediated the effect of FSL on TCB and WFE and psychological distress played a serial mediating role between FSL and TCB. Co-worker support positively moderated the relationship between FSL and WFE, TCB and psychological distress.

Managers should consider the problems and difficulties that employees may encounter in completing their work tasks and performance and minimise the interference of non-work factors on employees’ work status. Organisations should also facilitate diversity training for managers to respond to employees’ work and life problems and display family support behaviour.

This study confirmed the role of FSL in WFE, psychological distress and TCB. The results can provide guidance for managers to motivate employees’ TCB.

The pandemic has necessitated employees to work virtually due to mandatory work-from-home setup. Since every employee is not comfortable working online owing to their individual differences which impact performance, thus, it is essential to identify individual characteristics governing performance. As per conventional theories, cognition and metacognition have a significant impact on employee performance, and the key to performance in a collaborative online environment also is metacognition. However, this has been scarcely explored in the context of virtual workspace. This study, therefore, empirically investigates the influence of metacognition and its sub-domains on employees' virtual performance given the challenges they face in a virtual work environment.

The cross-sectional study used a purposive sampling technique for data collection. Data collected from 534 professionals with high and low levels of metacognitive ability is analysed using univariate analysis to ascertain whether metacognitive ability helps employees deal with challenges associated with virtual work environments and perform better.

Results confirm a significant relationship between the level of metacognitive ability and virtual performance. Further, the findings also confirm the interaction effect of the level of metacognitive ability and challenge of maintaining work and non-work boundaries and the need for the physical presence of team member/s in predicting virtual performance.

This study is the first empirical attempt to examine the linkage between metacognitive ability and performance among professionals in the context of post-pandemic virtual work environment and challenges.

The study aims to investigate the impact of workplace ostracism (WO) and fear of the COVID-19 pandemic on the family life of restaurant employees. This research is based on the conservation of resources (COR) theory and work–family interface model to understand the theoretical underpinnings of mistreatment in the food sector during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study utilized a survey with a structured questionnaire to collect time-lagged data from 238 restaurant employees in the central region of Punjab province in Pakistan. The collected data were analyzed using the SPSS tool with modern-day techniques like bootstrapping, process macro and SmartPLS.

The study reveals that perceived stress levels of the employees increase due to ostracism, leading to work–family conflict. Furthermore, the study found that employees who fear COVID-19 are less stressed by ostracism.

The study's significant contribution lies in demonstrating that the impact of ostracism in the workplace is quite different from what was expected. The results have shown that ostracism can reduce the perceived stress levels of employees, leading to a decrease in work–family conflict, especially in the presence of fear of COVID-19.

COVID-19 disrupted the usual way of working for many people across the globe, making full-time work from home and hybrid models two popular work arrangements. Despite the proliferation and high acceptance of the hybrid model, very little research has focused on the same. This study aims to compare the impact of transitions caused by remote work on work disengagement under two settings: remote work and hybrid model.

The data is collected from three corporate hubs in India: Hyderabad, Gurgaon and Bangalore. This study’s respondents represent two working models: full-time work from home and a hybrid model. Responses were collected using Google forms-based questionnaire, which resulted in the following usable responses: 356 (hybrid) and 398 (work from home).

The findings reveal that the structural model for the hybrid sector explained 11% of the variance in work disengagement, while the same for work from home model accounted for 20% of the variance in work disengagement. The authors also tested for the moderation of individual resilience between work-home and home-to-work conflicts and home-to-work transitions and work-to-home conflict under full-time work-from and hybrid models. Based on 356 respondents from hybrid category and 398 from work from home, the study found that employees experience less work-to-home and home-to-work conflicts in the hybrid model and employees experience more work-to-home and home-to-work conflicts in the full-time work from home model.

The study is also the first to examine the moderating role of individual resilience as a tool to bounce back and handle conflicts. As the full-time work from home model leads to more work-to-home and home-to-work conflicts, individuals have more scope to exhibit resilience, and thus, the moderating relationship is stronger in the full-time work from home model. The paper offers theoretical and managerial implications.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the study of work-life balance (WLB) by exploring the influence of WLB amongst older workers. Theoretically, this study suggests that the psychological benefits of age on relationships between WLB and well-being might be stronger for those “younger” older workers than those working toward or beyond retirement age. This study tests a moderated mediation model whereby the effects of WLB on anxiety and depression (through job stress) are moderated by age.

Survey data from 512 New Zealand employees in three older age cohorts (55–59 years, 60–64 and 65+ years).

This study finds that WLB reduces job stress and leads to lower anxiety and depression. Job stress positively influences anxiety and depression and partially mediates the influence of WLB. Significant interaction effects are found by age, with the lower age cohort (55–59 years) reporting the strongest benefits from WLB and this effect reduces as employees get older but remains significant.

Even when focusing on older workers, the findings show younger older workers elicit stronger benefits from WLB toward well-being, although all age groups find WLB beneficial.

This paper offers novel insights into the question of whether the importance of WLB for well-being differs among older workers.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of blended working (BW) on individual payoffs like psychological ownership (PO), affective organizational commitment (AOC) and digital stress (DS). Additionally, the study also examines the moderating role of organizational optimism (OO) on the relationships stated to determine the boundary condition of the relationship between BW and the individual payoffs.

A longitudinal field survey based on executives employed in the Indian service industries (comprised of state-owned banks, three healthcare and four MNCs) was conducted. Levels of BW, AOC, PO, DS and OO were measured through a validated scale, and the relationships' significance was explored.

The result indicated that BW positively influences AOC and DS, while OO influences PO positively and DS negatively. OO also moderates the influence of BW on PO and DS.

This research extends its contribution to the extant literature by (1) exploring the unique context of research in work conditions (BW) across India, (2) examining macro level factor (OO) in the linkage between BW and psychosocial factors, (3) investigating the moderating effect of OO and (4) considering a relatively large sample for empirical analysis in several waves to study BW and its individual pay-offs.