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This chapter focuses on exploring challenges encountered by the neglected group of employees who live alone and do not have children, particularly in relation to work-life balance (WLB). We first question the conventional WLB discourse – predominately surrounded by addressing work-family conflicts. We next discuss how this formulates debates about the equality and fairness of HR policies affecting various groups of employees, with solo-living individuals being excluded. In addition to previously documented work-life issues, we articulate difficulties related to the pursuit of independence, freedom, balancing, and healthy work-life experiences for and specific to solo-living women academics. We conclude that our insights on “vulnerability” may lead to feminist approach being incorporated into work-life policy development in order to better engage underrepresented groups of employees, accommodate the needs of “others” and promote collective flourishing.

The comment addresses the idea of substituting professional elder care with informal care provided by early retirees to save economic costs.

The comment arose from reading “How to handle gerontocracy”, scientific research and critical, analytical thinking.

While having early pensioners deliver elderly care has positive implications, substituting professional with informal care must be challenged. First, the “unused reservoir” of early pensioners might be overestimated, as they often already have care responsibilities. Second, the substitution of professional services is already happening due to staff shortages. Third, untrained caregivers might struggle to provide the needed care quality, resulting in worse health outcomes (and higher follow-up costs). Finally, there are concerns of social sustainability: because of role expectations, mainly women may take on care tasks, reinforcing social inequality. Also, the third sector might lose hours of volunteer work.

The comment appeals to a critically rethinking of the idea of substituting professional services with informal care provision and argues for differentiated and well-tailored policy measures, taking into account the complex nature of (informal) caregiving.

A growing body of research has suggested that the fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic has disproportionately impacted vulnerable groups such as working women, parents and older adults. Accordingly, and via the lens of social role and identity theories on gender and age at work, the authors examined the intersection of age, gender and potential caregiving responsibilities on worker well-being, work-family conflict and performance while working remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In all, 1,174 Turkish job incumbents working from home either full- or part-time responded to a survey measuring self-reported anxiety, depression, stress, work-to-family conflict, family-to-work conflict and performance in the summer of 2020.

Despite using Bayesian modeling, good sample variability on age, gender and caregiving responsibilities, data collection timing allowing for the maximization of variance in individual attitudes toward working from home during the pandemic, outcome measures that evidenced excellent reliability and reasonably good data fit, and the inclusion of appropriate covariates and stringent robustness tests, hypothesized effects were overall found to be null.

The authors suggest that if remote work helps level the playing field, then that is impetus for organizations to further transition into such work arrangements.

The authors speculate on these counterintuitive results and suggest implications for future research and practice on the confluence of remote work and workplace diversity, including the potential benefits of remote work for women and older adults, the role of cultural values and the use of Bayesian methods to infer support for the null.

Working remotely in a COVID-19-induced lockdown has been challenging for both organisations and their employees; studies report that job demands changed, and teleworkers experienced increased burnout. This paper explores the negative employee outcomes that this work arrangement brings along and offers possible solutions to counter such negative outcomes since they could be detrimental to the much-touted future of work.

The study adopted a time-lagged longitudinal design and collected two-waved data from 403 quaternary sector employees. The data were analysed using structural equation modelling and model-21 in PROCESS macro for SPSS.

Findings affirm that employees experienced increased job demands during this crisis. Employees reported an increase in turnover intention because of burnout caused by increased job demands. However, increased task interdependence alone did not have any effect on turnover intention. The perceived organisational task support (POTS) was found to forestall the negative effect of job demands on burnout, and employee resilience (ER) buffered the burnout and turnover intention relationship.

Providing remote work task support and boosting resilience among employees will help in doing away with the negative effects of teleworking. However, managers shall prioritise reducing job demands for teleworkers.

The linkage between work factors and turnover intention is well established. Drawing on the event system theory and using the COVID-19 context, the present study added to the existing knowledge by studying the role of job demands (workload pressure and task interdependence) on turnover intention through the mediation of burnout. The study goes beyond the existing literature by accounting for POTS as a first-level moderator between job demands and burnout relationship, and ER as a second-level moderator between burnout and turnover intention relationship.

The high and persistent unemployment rates of people with intellectual disabilities (PwID) reveal the wide gap that still remains to be bridged. Entrepreneurship combinedly with a high enterprising tendency could improve PwID's life satisfaction.

A mixed-method approach was used, based on questionnaires and structured face-to-face interviews on 37 PwID who had recently become entrepreneurs. Data were firstly quantitatively analyzed using partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM), and qualitative data were used to enable robust findings.

The entrepreneurial tendency of PwID who had recently become entrepreneurs was found to be a positive to their life quality (LQ), job satisfaction and life satisfaction.

This study revealed that entrepreneurship among PwID who had high enterprising tendency enhances their LQ, job satisfaction and life satisfaction. However, further research could evaluate whether becoming an entrepreneur is in itself enough to change PwID's life to better, such that a comparison could be done between PwID who become entrepreneurs and PwID who have a salaried job.

New aspects in the design of public social policies to improve PwID's life satisfaction are suggested. These include the facilitation of both entrepreneurship and enterprising tendency for PwID to enhance their life satisfaction.

There are very few occasions in which PwID set up businesses. This is one of the first studies to analyze the benefit of entrepreneurship and enterprising tendency on the LQ, the satisfaction at work and the life satisfaction of PwID.

Building on the premise of conservation of resources theory (COR) that people protect their knowledge as a resource, the authors questioned whether the contextual nature of job resources buffers the counterintuitive positive relationship between evasive knowledge hiding (KH) and task performance.

Two multisource field survey studies were conducted to examine the moderating influence of task-job resources on the knowledge hiders' task performance. Hierarchical regression analyses tested the main effect of evasive KH on task performance. In addition, conditional process analyses were applied to examine two-way and three-way interactions of evasive KH, job autonomy and task variety.

The data analysis showed a positive relationship between evasive KH and task performance. Moreover, the authors found that employees receiving accumulative task-job resources continued to hide knowledge and used abundant resources to increase their task performance further. However, contrary to expectations, for employees—who received partial task-job resources—their task performance deteriorated when evasively hiding knowledge.

Managers and human resource practitioners should acknowledge that employees' evasive KH to co-workers is not always wrong and should not be treated like it is. Moreover, they are endorsed to pay attention and invest in job resources since job autonomy and task variety create a beneficial context for knowledge holders' task performance.

The authors provided novel theoretical (the gain-loss perspective of COR theory) and consistent empirical (confirmed by two field-study evidence) arguments for an important contextual role of an HRM practice of job design in shaping the underrepresented knowledge behavior–task performance relationship.

This paper aims to discuss the issues and challenges related to housing continuity for individuals transitioning from homelessness to securing a place to live in Klang Valley, Malaysia. The aim of the study is to explore the problems and solutions in the context of housing policy, particularly as they pertain to homeless households. The study involves conducting in-depth interviews with various stakeholders involved in helping homeless households find shelter and access to public housing.

The research methodology comprises a comprehensive literature review encompassing housing affordability, affordable housing and homelessness both within Malaysia and globally to identify research gaps. One of the key questions highlighted the effectiveness of existing programs aimed at providing short-term shelter and social integration for homeless individuals. Additionally, it highlights one of the primary challenges in this process, which is the tendency of homeless individuals to return to homelessness due to various factors. The data collection uses a qualitative approach and the data are obtained through in-depth interviews with key stakeholders responsible for assisting homeless households in Klang Valley, Malaysia, encompassing federal, state and local government representatives. Purposive sampling ensures diverse stakeholder representation. Interviews are structured semi-structured to maintain consistency while allowing for open-ended discussions on challenges and successes in facilitating homeless individuals' transition to stable housing. Thematic analysis of transcribed interview data focuses on recurring themes related to housing continuity, affordability and homeless households' behavioural patterns.

There are five (n = 5) stakeholders consist of local government (Code: R1), ministries (Code: R2; R5) and government agencies (Code: R3; R4). The study revealed that various programs have been implemented to provide short-term shelter and facilitate the integration of homeless individuals into society. Nevertheless, a significant challenge identified was the recurring tendency of homeless households to return to homelessness. This “behavioural direction” was found to be influenced by multiple factors which includes mental health and attitude problem. The findings emphasise the need for collaborative efforts among all stakeholders to address the issues and challenges related to housing continuity in Klang Valley.

The originality of this research lies in its focus on the specific and under-researched context of Klang Valley, Malaysia, regarding the critical issues of housing affordability and the challenges of housing continuity for homeless households. While housing affordability and affordable housing are widely recognised as global housing policy concerns, this study delves into a localised setting where limited attention has been given to understanding the transitions of homeless individuals to stable housing. The findings provide unique insights into the efforts and challenges faced in Klang Valley, shedding light on the behavioural patterns and factors contributing to recurring homelessness. This paper offers a context-specific perspective that contributes to the broader understanding of housing continuity issues.

How do radical technological fields become naturalized and taken for granted? This is a fundamental question given both the positive and negative hype surrounding the emergence of many new technologies. In this chapter, we study the emergence of the US nanotechnology field, focusing on uncovering the mechanisms by which leaders of the National Nanotechnology Initiative managed hype and its concomitant legitimacy challenges which threatened the commercial viability of nanotechnology. Drawing on the cultural entrepreneurship literature at the interface of strategy and organization theory, we argue that the construction of a naturalizing frame – a frame that focuses attention and practice on mundane, “rationalized” activity – is key to legitimating a novel and uncertain technological field. Leveraging the insights from our case study, we further develop a staged process model of how a naturalizing frame may be constructed, thereby paving the way for a decrease in hype and the institutionalization of new technologies.