Search results

The Covid-19 virus badly affected working patterns in almost every sector. The purpose of this paper is to analytically substantiate how work and life integration impacts the exhaustion and work–life balance among employees of academic institutions and IT companies.

Current study is empirical in nature based on the survey of 500 respondents taken from academic (250) and IT companies (250) from Ahmedabad and Gandhinagar, Gujarat. Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to test the hypothesis with the application of the software Smart-PLS. Two surveys were conducted to collect the data separately for academic institutions and IT organizations.

Findings revealed the facts that during Covid-19, the employee’s work and life integration affected the work–life balance and exhaustion in academic institutions highly. The relationship was positively significant. But, for IT employees, it was identified as non-significant.

The current study highlighted the issues which employees faced during Covid-19 severe spread while managing work and family; how it varied due to the nature of work performed by the employees, for example, academics being more exposed to transformation from offline to complete online mode posed more challenges to teaching staff. This study also disclosed the scenario created and how it was handled in the deadly phase.

This study presents the social contribution in understanding the importance of work and life balance and problems related to it, especially when everyone everywhere is scared of going out. The study provides insight into how it became difficult for employees to maintain their payroll successfully.

The current study contributes to the existing body of knowledge by testing statistically that the integration between work and life is important for work–life balance and prohibiting emotional exhaustion. The current paper extends the theoretical contribution by offering suggestions to companies on why to synchronize positive balance between work and life while keeping boundaries relatively strict between family and work to gain employee well-being and competitive advantages.

The growing demands of work and life have shifted the concept of work-life balance to work-life integration (WLI). The success of integration depends upon the flexibility to perform the duties. This paper aims to explore the factors that affect WLI and the role of flexible work arrangements (FWAs) in the process of WLI.

Systematic literature review was used to explore the concept of WLI and FWAs. A bibliometric analysis was carried out with Bibexcel and VoSviewer.

This paper explained the organizational and personal factors that create the demand for WLI. The FWAs, perceived flexibility, technology and self-efficacy have important roles in WLI. The result of WLI can be enrichment or strain, depends upon how effectively the work-life domains are integrated.

This paper explores the work-life from both personal and organizational views. The findings of this paper will be useful to design the organizational policies and work arrangements that match the requirements of employees and organizations. This paper helps to develop the future research agenda of investigating the relations of WLI to performance, organizational policies and personal factors.

Utilizing boundary theory as a guiding framework, this study aims to explore facets of work–life balance (WLB) that women entrepreneurs experience in the context of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It sheds light on strategies women entrepreneurs use to manage and shape boundaries between their personal and professional lives.

In this qualitative study, we conducted in-depth interviews with 50 women entrepreneurs to gain a deeper understanding of their WLB challenges.

Integration is a boundary management approach used by most women in our sample, facilitated by the thin work–life boundary inferable from their entrepreneurial careers. Integration has all the hallmarks of being imposed on women entrepreneurs because of family role challenges and societal expectations, on top of their entrepreneurial obligations. Women are reactors; they shoulder societal, family and entrepreneurial roles while having little control over events and circumstances.

Boundary theory suggests two roles must be interconnected to coexist successfully. Women entrepreneurs can benefit from the synergy between their personal and professional lives. As their roles tend to be more complex, it is essential to consider the consolidation of both spheres as an ongoing process to maximize their benefits.

Today’s independent forms of working are contingent on flexible work arrangements, work intensification and wireless communication. Understanding how women entrepreneurs find balance amid boundarylessness adds to our limited knowledge of people in comparable environments.

This paper aims to examine the link between spirituality, work-life integration, work passion and mental health among millennial employees. It also tests the mediating effect of the dualistic model of work passion in the framework.

A cross-sectional quantitative design was adopted using samples of 167 millennial employees from the education and service sectors. Results were analysed using Statistical Package of Social Science, Process macro extension and AMOS modelling software.

The findings indicated that millennials’ spirituality was positively linked to harmonious passion, while work-life integration was positively linked with obsessive and high mental health symptoms. Mediating effects were also discovered in which harmonious passion fully mediated the positive relationship between spirituality and mental health symptoms. While obsessive passion partially mediated work-life integration and mental health symptoms.

This paper highlights the mediating influence of millennials’ work passion for explaining their mental health symptoms. It also suggests the practicality and essential roles of spirituality and work-life integration in managing the mental health of existing and future millennials in the workforce.

Work–nonwork policies and practices provide support for employee well-being, as well as a competitive advantage that can help differentiate organizations. However, not all work–nonwork policies and practices are effective, utilized, or relevant. In this chapter, the authors introduce “organizational boundary management strategy” as a way to leverage these policies and practices, making them more widely adopted and more effective. Organizational boundary management strategy refers to how an organization as a whole tends to support workers’ work–nonwork boundaries (i.e., via segmentation, integration, or somewhere in between). Although boundary management has historically tended to focus on how individuals navigate distinctions between work and personal life, the authors extend boundary management to the organization to suggest how understanding and aligning the organization’s overall boundary management strategies can support worker well-being. To expound on this, the authors present a model suggesting how organizational boundary management can be used to support worker well-being.

This paper aims to understand how context-related factors impacted productivity for managers while working from home in the Luxembourgish market during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also screens for coping mechanisms causing better mental and work-related results.

A focus group approach was applied with 46 participants. Participants were placed into 11 groups, and the research was conducted from July 2021 to October 2021. The findings are based on the in-depth analysis of the qualitative data using atlas.ti software.

Challenges that the participants had faced while working from home during COVID-19 revealed issues in all four layers of the context-related framework. Social challenges, namely loneliness, communication and trust, were most present among those four layers. Ensuring a better person-environment fit by using different coping mechanisms by participants, produced a healthier psychological and mental state, claimed by participants.

This research was conducted in Luxembourg and on middle managers and did not involve a large sample. Additionally, future research might strive for quantitative data to better understand the phenomenon of work from anywhere and its relations to work-life integration, stress and resilience.

The paper adds more clarification on the application of the context-related factors and person-environment fit necessary for resilience and thus productivity of employees. In addition, the paper may serve managers and HR managers to develop more impactful practices, processes, education and tools to support working from home.

The paper explores personal challenges and coping mechanisms while working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic in Luxembourg.

This paper aims to examine the current quality of work-life (QWL) situation and the effectiveness of labor laws for promoting QWL in the context of Nepalese workplaces.

It uses a descriptive-interpretative-qualitative approach to analyze the responses. Information is gathered through discussions with 85 higher- and middle-level managers of large and medium-sized organizations.

The majority of Nepalese organizations accept safe and healthy working conditions, social relevance of work-life, social integration in the work organization, and work and total life space as the key aspects of QWL. They have become even more critical as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, they face challenges in providing employees with opportunities for continued growth and security, immediate opportunity to use and develop human capacities, adequate and fair compensation and constitutionalism in the work organization. QWL-related provisions in Labour Act, 2017, play a vital role in promoting the QWL situation. The QWL programs offer many benefits to employees’ private and working lives. The lack of such programs would undoubtedly have negative consequences for Nepalese companies. Compliance with labor laws will promote a better QWL situation at Nepalese workplaces.

Only managerial perspectives are considered for examining the current situation of QWL and the effectiveness of QWL-related provisions of the Labour Act, 2017. It excludes the views of union leaders.

This paper indicates that labor laws’ QWL-related provisions are effective. It also provides several policy measures for promoting a better QWL in Nepalese workplaces.

This study presents QWL-related legal provisions and the actual situation at the workplaces of Nepal. It also presents the key aspects of QWL in the context of Nepal.

Work-life flexibility policies (e.g., flextime, telework, part-time, right-to-disconnect, and leaves) are increasingly important to employers as productivity and well-being strategies. However, policies have not lived up to their potential. In this chapter, the authors argue for increased research attention to implementation and work-life intersectionality considerations influencing effectiveness. Drawing on a typology that conceptualizes flexibility policies as offering employees control across five dimensions of the work role boundary (temporal, spatial, size, permeability, and continuity), the authors develop a model identifying the multilevel moderators and mechanisms of boundary control shaping relationships between using flexibility and work and home performance. Next, the authors review this model with an intersectional lens. The authors direct scholars’ attention to growing workforce diversity and increased variation in flexibility policy experiences, particularly for individuals with higher work-life intersectionality, which is defined as having multiple intersecting identities (e.g., gender, caregiving, and race), that are stigmatized, and link to having less access to and/or benefits from societal resources to support managing the work-life interface in a social context. Such an intersectional focus would address the important need to shift work-life and flexibility research from variable to person-centered approaches. The authors identify six research considerations on work-life intersectionality in order to illuminate how traditionally assumed work-life relationships need to be revisited to address growing variation in: access, needs, and preferences for work-life flexibility; work and nonwork experiences; and benefits from using flexibility policies. The authors hope that this chapter will spur a conversation on how the work-life interface and flexibility policy processes and outcomes may increasingly differ for individuals with higher work-life intersectionality compared to those with lower work-life intersectionality in the context of organizational and social systems that may perpetuate growing work-life and job inequality.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has (triggered) lots of interest in work from home (WFH) practices. Many organizations in India are changing their work practices and adopting new models of getting the work done. The purpose of the study to look at the boundary-fit perspective (Ammons (2013) and two factors, namely, individual preferences (boundary control, family identity, work identity and technology stress) and environmental factors (job control, supervisor support and organizational policies). These dimensions are used and considered to create various clusters for employees working from home.

K-mean clustering was used to do the cluster analysis. Statistical package for social sciences 23 was used to explore different clusters based on a pattern of characteristics unique to that cluster, but each cluster differed from other clusters. Further analysis of variance test was conducted to see how these clusters differ across three chosen outcomes, namely, work-family conflict, boundary management tactics used and positive family-to-work spillover effect. The post hoc test also provided insights on how each cluster differs from others on these outcomes.

The results indicated four distinct clusters named boundary-fit family guardians, work warriors, boundary-fit fusion lovers and dividers consistent (with previous) research. These clusters also differ across at least two major outcomes like boundary management tactics and positive spillover. The high control cluster profiles like Cluster 3 (boundary-fit fusion lovers) and Cluster 4 (dividers) showed low technostress and higher use of boundary management tactics. Cluster 3 (boundary-fit fusion lovers) and Cluster 1 (boundary-fit family guardians) having high environmental influencers also showed higher positive family-to-work spillover.

Because this study is very specific to the Indian context, a broad generalization requires further exploration in other cultural contexts. The absence of this exploration is one of the limitations of this study. On the culture continuum, countries may vary from being individualistic on one extreme to being collectivistic on the other extreme. Interaction of these two cultural extremities with the individual and the environmental dimension, as espoused in this research, can be examined further in a different cultural setting.

This study has extended the work of Ammons (2013) and added external influencers as a dimension to the individual preferences given by (Kossek 2016), and created the cluster for employees in the Indian context. This study has demonstrated the importance of reduced technostress, and the use of boundary management tactics (temporal and behavioral) leads to positive family-to-work spillover. It has also emphasized the relevance of organization policies and supervisor support for better outcomes in WFH.

The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly impacted work, leading to the adoption of remote work practices and changes in power dynamics and trust. Although managing remote work has received much attention, the impact of the quality of work life on the effectiveness of hybrid workplaces has been less studied. This study aims to examine the relationship between quality of work life and psychological capital among organizational leaders using an artificial neural network (ANN) model.

This study used a cross-sectional quantitative methodology. A structured questionnaire was used to collect 268 responses from organizational leaders using the convenience sampling method. The data collected were analyzed using the ANN model in the Python interface.

The ANN model training and testing revealed that there is a positive relationship between the quality of work life and psychological capital among organizational leaders. The R-squared values for hope, efficacy, resilience and optimism were 85.19%, 82.08%, 78.55% and 81.08%, respectively, in the training set, and 81.30%, 78.95%, 76.52% and 71.41% in the testing set.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous research in the context of studying the relationship between quality of work life and psychological capital among organizational leaders using the machine learning approach – ANN model.