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The COVID-19 pandemic created not only a public health crisis but also the largest disruption to the global economies. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the adverse impacts of the pandemic on self-employment including job loss, income reduction and cut back in work hours and how these impacts were related to the well-being the self-employed. The authors also examine how self-employers responded to adversity in different cultural settings.

The main sample was obtained the Gallup World Poll that covers more than 39,000 individuals across 55 countries over the period from October 2020 to June 2021. The ordinary least square was the main choice of methodology. The paper employs the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition technique to quantify the gap in financial loss between self-employed and employed individuals. Finally, the moderated mediation analysis allows the authors to examine how financial loss mediates the reduction in well-being of self-employers.

The paper finds that self-employers were 29% more likely to lose their businesses than paid individuals to lose their jobs and perhaps as a result, they were 50% more likely to experience lower work hours and less income. The findings suggest that the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic varied across countries. The financial gap between self-employment and full-time employment was narrower in countries with individualism, low uncertainty avoidance and propensity for long-term future. Finally, the paper shows that although financial loss associated with the coronavirus situation mediated the relationship between self-employment and reduced wellbeing, the positive relationship between self-employment and life satisfaction (wellbeing) held amid the pandemic. Despite all the pecuniary setbacks relative to full-time employment, self-employers report higher subjective wellbeing than regular wage earners during difficult times.

The earnings gap between self-employers and employees persists (and increase) during adverse conditions may cast into doubt the efficiency of the economic system that ensures no one is left behind. In addition, contextual factors such as cultural values should also be taken into consideration in reducing the earning gap between self-employment and regular employment. It is also implied that the self-employed choose to engage in self-employment due to psychological and emotion benefits rather than material achievements.

This study has quantified the income gap between self-employment and employed individuals in the context of adverse economic conditions. This study also highlights the fact that despite all the financial setbacks, self-employers are happier than employed individuals and they engage in self-employment as an important way to pursue happiness. This highlights well-being as the critical non-pecuniary benefits of the career choice of and transition into self-employment that have been confirmed in extant entrepreneurship literature.

This paper aims to improve our understanding of performance measurement systems in the health and care sector, by focussing on employee reactions to core performance measurement practices. Targets and monitoring are hypothesised to be associated with employee perceptions of job control, supportive management and job demands, which in turn, are expected to be linked to employee-wellbeing and organisational commitment.

Matched employee workplace data are extracted from a nationally representative and publicly available survey. Structural equation models are estimated.

Performance measurement systems are neither perceived as resources nor additional demands. Setting many targets and a focus on productivity can lead to negative employee outcomes, since these positively correlate with perceptions of job demands, which negatively correlate with employee wellbeing. However, monitoring financial performance and monitoring employee performance may be helpful to managers, as these are positively associated with employee perceptions of job control and supportive management, which positively correlate with job satisfaction and organisational commitment and, negatively, with anxiety. Overall, common criticisms of performance measurement systems in healthcare are questioned.

Given the lack of consensus on how performance measurement systems can influence employee experiences and outcomes, this study combines theories that argue for performance measurement systems in managing operations with models developed by psychologists to describe how perceptions of the work conditions can affect employee attitude and wellbeing. A conceptual model is therefore developed and tested, and potential direct and indirect effects of performance measurement systems in the health sector are inferred.

The current study inspects pathways through which job crafting relates to the quality of employees' working lives. To date, this has been mostly done either by linking job crafting to individual job characteristics or by investigating its association with separate aspects of occupational well-being (such as work engagement), whereas empirical evidence about how it may affect one's overall work situation remains scarce.

To address this question, the authors conducted latent profile analyses based on selected job resources and job demands, which allowed the authors to derive distinct work environment patterns prevailing in a heterogeneous sample of 1,064 employees. Four patterns were identified denoting a passive, high-strain, low-strain and optimally balanced work environment types. The authors then tested the hypothesis that job crafting would relate to employees' odds of exposure to these patterns and that the latter would differentiate between high and low work engagement.

Approach job crafting was related to higher odds of being exposed to a favourably balanced work environment, and the reverse was true of avoidance crafting. Work engagement differed as a function of the quality of the work environment. Furthermore, the results suggested a potentially indirect link between approach job crafting and work engagement via exposure to different work environment types, whereas avoidance crafting related to lower work engagement only directly.

The findings contribute to theory testing and practice by providing a holistic representation of the work environment and then interlinking its features with employee proactivity and engagement.

The purpose of this study is to systematically review the recent empirical literature on job stress and burnout among prison staff with a focus on predictors, outcomes of stress and burnout and the mediating role that stress and burnout can play between its predictors and outcomes.

The authors followed systematic literature review (SLR) protocols for the social sciences, and searches were done on two large research databases: SCOPUS and Web of Science. Articles included in the study were from January 2015 to March 2020. After the screening and eligibility processes, 48 articles met the inclusion/exclusion criteria, and 33 articles were included in the full-text qualitative analysis.

Characteristics of the samples, main authors and journals and measures used to assess stress and burnout are presented, showing that most research was done in the USA, with cross-sectional studies using similar measures of stress and burnout. Results from the qualitative analysis were organised around the main research questions. Most studies explored the antecedents of stress and burnout in the context of the job demands – resources model. Common predictors that consistently increase stress and burnout among different samples include perceived dangerousness of the job and work–family conflict. Participation in decision-making and social support consistently decrease job stress.

This paper presents a SLR on stress and burnout among prison officers in a pre-COVID-19 pandemic era, providing an important picture of the published scientific research on the topic as well as implications for theory and practice.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the phenomenon of defensive biasing in work stress surveys, which occurs when employees trivialize potential stressors and strains due to fear of negative consequences from their supervisors or management. This study aims to better understand the factors that influence this behavior and to develop a scale to measure it.

The study used an online survey of 200 employees to investigate the factors influencing defensive biasing behavior. The researchers developed a scale for defensive biasing with the help of subject matter experts and derived possible factors from the literature. Participants were presented with a hypothetical scenario in which they imagined a work stress survey in their organization and were asked to answer related items. The data were analyzed using regression analysis.

The study found that defensive biasing behavior was significantly predicted by perceived anonymity and neuroticism. Participants who felt less anonymous and had higher levels of neuroticism were more likely to engage in defensive biasing. Job insecurity and trust in supervisors were not found to be significant predictors of defensive biasing.

This study contributes to the literature on work stress surveys by developing a scale for defensive biasing and investigating the factors that influence this behavior. The study highlights the importance of making the survey process more transparent to reduce defensive biasing and obtain trustworthy results.

This study aims to test the relationship between emotional labor and service quality of the frontline employees of Chinese restaurants during the coronavirus disease pandemic (COVID-19). This study further investigated the mediating role of work fatigue (WF) and the moderating role of supervisor–subordinate Guanxi (SSG).

The authors used a time-lag approach to gather data from a sample of 365 frontline staff members working in Chinese restaurants. All hypotheses were tested using SPSS and AMOS.

First, restaurant frontline employees’ deep acting was associated with higher service quality, whereas surface acting leads to lower service quality. Second, WF mediated the relationship between emotional labor and service quality. Third, SSG moderated the impact of emotional labor on WF during COVID-19.

All variables measured in this study were self-reported by restaurant frontline employees, which may increase the risk of common-method bias. However, this study enriches the literature on emotional labor, WF and SSG during COVID-19.

COVID-19 has severely affected the hotel, restaurant and catering sector and especially the psychological state and the work performance of frontline employees. Restaurant managers should implement some measures to improve employees’ service quality during COVID-19.

The present findings show that restaurant frontline employees adopted various emotional labor strategies when they were faced with higher than usual job demands and the risk of infection during COVID-19.

This paper aims to examine work design and the linkages of work design with the work–life balance of academics in higher education (HE).

A sample of 307 academics was recruited for this study. The result was analysed using SPSS (statistical package of social science) and AMOS (analysis of moment structure) structural equation modelling (SEM).

This paper discovered that high autonomy, task significance, task identity and feedback were linked to greater work-to-family enrichment (W-FE) levels amongst academics, whilst, low job autonomy, task identity and task significance were linked to high work-to-family conflict (W-FC) levels.

This paper highlights the importance of promoting good academics' work–life balance by evaluating and improvising the academics' work design.

Israel ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and has subsequently worked towards putting disability-empowering policies and facilities in place. This study explores the experiences of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel with disabilities in everyday life including education, employment and accessing disability facilities and services.

This study explores the challenges and experiences of Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with a disparate group of Arab men and women with various forms of disabilities.

This research indicates that Arabs with disabilities are either unable to access them or do so with great difficulty relative to their Jewish counterparts. The findings suggest that this is due to one of two reasons: first is institutional discrimination by Jewish and Arab staff, and second is structural discrimination as facilities and services are specifically designed for the Jewish majority and their areas of residence as opposed to Arab residential areas.

Guided by intersectional theory, this article explores how the multiple identities of Arabs with disabilities living in Israel are co-constituted and ordered by different social and political structures which inform their daily lived experiences. This research illustrates that in Jewish politics and institutions, Arabs with disabilities in Israel are “otherised” by being flatly identified as Palestinians; yet, within their Arab communities, they are “otherised” by being reduced solely to their disability. This article examines how this variation in ordering and reduction can lead to specific experiences and forms of discrimination that requires multi-dimensional approaches and ways forward.

This study investigates the key factors that influence customer satisfaction when interacting with augmented reality shopping assistance applications (ARSAPs). ARSAPs grant consumers the capability to experience products in a virtually simulated user environment before product acquisition. With the development of mobile e-commerce due to breakthroughs in smartphone and augmented reality (AR) technologies, there is an increasing potential for these emergent AR mobile services, yet there is a need for further improvement.

This study initially explored the key satisfaction factors for ARSAPs by utilizing topic modeling of a collection of actual user reviews. These factors are subsequently revisited and complemented by existing literature, and finally verified through logistic regression analysis supported by sentiment analysis.

This study identified the key factors that influence customer satisfaction with ARSAPs, including visuality, sense of reality, credibility, format, completeness, understandability, relevance, flexibility, response time, reliability, availability, ease of use and privacy. In particular, two additional factors (i.e. visuality and sense of reality) were newly identified as important in the context of AR, despite their previous omissions in existing literature.

This study is the first to investigate the key factors that influence customer satisfaction with ARSAPs from users' perspectives, utilizing topic modeling of a large amount of real-world data on actual user feedback. By identifying new factors (i.e. visuality and sense of reality) that were not identified in previous literature, this study provides important academic implications for a broader understanding of AR and related technologies that are essential elements of the metaverse. This study also provides valuable insights for developers and companies in the e-commerce industry on how to optimize AR applications and develop more targeted and effective marketing strategies in this field.

This research aims to determine the influence that work flexibility (WF) has on the happiness of workers through the work and personal life balance, work-life balance (WLB), as a mediating variable, as well as the moderating role of gender between WLB and job happiness (JH). A structural model that describes the interactions between these study variables is proposed.

A quantitative approach was used. The data were collected by non-probabilistic sampling, surveying 200 mid-level employees in small and medium industrial enterprises (industrial SMEs). The proposed hypotheses were analyzed and tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The results confirmed the hypotheses presented. In the relation of WLB and JH, positive work-family and family-work interactions would result in a greater increase in JH in the women group compared to men, and special characteristics were found in the variables in the Mexican context.

This study will provide information to those responsible for the human resources departments of companies to design and implement good practices in which importance can be given to labor agreements involving WF and the implementation of WLB policies differentiated by gender to generate happiness at work.

The JH construct proposed by Fisher (2010) was applied, and its relationship with WF and WLB in a post-pandemic context was studied. The research applied to supervisors and area managers of industrial SMEs reflects the importance of considering the balance between their life and work to achieve JH, understanding it as job satisfaction and more commitment to work, in addition to considering the differences by gender.