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Digitalization and flexibility of workplaces as aspects of new ways of working are associated both positively and negatively with employees’ well-being. However, the mechanisms behind this relationship are not clear yet. We present work intensity as a link between new ways of working and psychological well-being. Furthermore, we address two job resources to alter this association: autonomy and boundary control.

Overall, 1,099 employees of a public administration organization participated in the survey and answered a web-based questionnaire. The organization was in the transition to new ways of working including the introduction of a digital filing system and remote work.

The results of regression analyses provided evidence that flexibility and dissolution of boundaries were positively related to work intensity, which in turn was associated with emotional exhaustion and work engagement. Thus, new ways of working were negatively associated with psychological well-being, mediated by work intensity. Further analyses revealed that the job resources of autonomy and boundary control moderated the relationship between flexibility respectively dissolution of boundaries with work intensity. Thus, these job resources acted as buffering factors and mitigated the association of new ways of working with work intensity.

The results indicated that work intensity could be perceived as a conceptual bridge between new ways of working and psychological well-being providing a promising target variable for the deployment of job resources to preserve employees’ well-being.

This paper aims to explore how employees reconceptualized their time and space to order and structure their lives in an unprecedented scenario of nonvoluntary work from home.

Set in the context of lockdowns due to the pandemic scenario, the study uses a constructivist approach to collect data through in-depth online interviews to understand how employees coped with the challenges emanating in a nonvoluntary work from home situation. The respondents were purposively selected to reflect a diverse pool in terms of gender, familial responsibilities and age/tenure.

The findings present temporal and spatial themes that provide several insights into how employees made sense of time and space as resources to navigate their challenging work-home roles.

In the present study, the authors found that when boundaries get violated, it does not necessarily manifest in the form of dissatisfaction with one or the other domain. The respondents in the current study show-cased adjustment mechanism to cope with the boundary permeability that happened. They adopted ways in which they could safe-guard their multiple identities in the situation they found themselves in, do justice to the salient roles in their lives, emerge as more empathetic humans and look forward to a brighter and more hopeful future. This opens-up a possibility of studying the theory behind human behavior in crisis-like situations and the degree of acceptance that people show when they find themselves in undesirable-unalterable situations.

A mental reorientation is required on the part of both employees and employers to navigate smoothly in this new “normal” and find more sustainable solutions to the problem if the remote working or hybrid mode of working becomes mainstay. Clear demarcations between work and nonwork time are a key element to ensure proper work schedules for remote workers. Offline meetings and get-togethers can be organized on a periodic basis to facilitate employee interaction and engagement. Participation of employees in key decisions becomes more important in such situations as it makes employees feel more connected with their work space.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is original as it is set in a completely unprecedented situation of lockdowns (during the pandemic) that affected the lives of everyone in some way or the other. The findings of the study are unique and insightful, as they help understand the sense-making mechanism adopted by people to successfully navigate through the crisis.

This study aims to answer the following question: Why might home-based work duties be perceived by female academics as extreme?

We employed a qualitative research method through semi-structured interviews with 33 female academics from three public universities selected from amongst 26 public institutions of higher education in Egypt. Thematic analysis was subsequently used to determine the main ideas in the transcripts.

We find that the sudden implementation of home-based work makes the academic duties of female academics extreme. Moreover, the following four factors help explain the extremity/intensity of the home-based work of female academics: mental and physical fatigue resulting from WFH, the inability to adequately meet family commitments when working from home (WFH), poor resources for home-based work and reduced ability to focus on the obstacles facing them in their academic career.

This paper contributes by filling a gap in human resources management and higher education in which empirical studies on female academics WFH and extreme academic duties have been limited so far.

This research investigates the challenges and benefits of working from home and the needs that organisations should understand when adopting working from home practices.

Self-determination theory was used to understand the drivers of motivation when working from home, to provide a deep understanding of how organisations may support employees working from home. A cross-sectional qualitative survey design was used to collect data from 511 office workers during May and June of 2020.

Employees' needs for competence were thwarted by a lack of direction and focus, unsuitable work environment, work extensification and negative work culture. Employees' experiences and needs for relatedness were more diverse, identifying that they enjoyed spending more time with family and having a greater connection to the outdoors, but felt more isolated and suffered from a lack of interaction. Employees' experiences of autonomy whilst working from home were also mixed, having less autonomy from blurred boundaries between home and work, as well as childcare responsibilities. Conversely, there was more freedom to be able to concentrate on physical health.

Employee’s needs for competence should be prioritised. Organisations must be conscious of this and provide the support that enables direction and focus when working at home.

Swathes of research were conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, but overwhelmingly focused on quantitative methods. A qualitative survey design enabled participants to answer meaningful open-ended questions, better suited to explain the complexity of their experiences, which allowed for understanding and richness not gained through previous studies.

Enforced work-from-home (EWFH) was the norm during the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to be implemented by many organizations owing to its long-term financial benefits. This study aims to understand the consequences of EWFH on the three psychological conditions of employee engagement: psychological safety, psychological availability and psychological meaningfulness.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 21 employees from different Indian companies. Thematic analysis was adopted to understand the consequences of EWFH on employee psychological safety, availability and meaningfulness.

The findings demonstrated that psychological meaningfulness, availability and safety were adversely impacted owing to limited choice and autonomy in EWFH.

This study contributes to the literature by examining the concept of EWFH in relation to psychological conditions, which is novel and relevant. Also, the job demands and resources framework and the COR theory are used together to explain the findings, which strengthens the concept of EWFH.

Organizations should consider various aspects of EWFH and make decisions to improve employees’ engagement at work.

This study focuses on an unexplored area and facilitates a better understanding of the concept of EWFH and its impact on employees’ psychological conditions. This study is valuable for both management professionals and organizations considering the continuation of EWFH after the pandemic. It also offers new avenues for future research.

Drawing on conservation of resource (COR) theory, the authors investigated relationships between bullying during work from home, turnover intention and meaningfulness of work among home-based teleworkers.

The authors used three-wave data from 212 home-based teleworkers to investigate the authors' hypotheses.

Findings reveal that bullying during home-based teleworking exacerbates teleworkers' emotional exhaustion and intention to quit. Further, the authors also found that the interrelationship between bullying during work from home and the intention to leave was positively moderated by the meaningfulness of work.

The authors' research helps understand how bullying stimulates teleworkers' turnover intention. Further, the authors find a counterintuitive impact of the meaningfulness of work on the relationship between bullying during work and turnover intention. The findings will help managers better manage home-based teleworkers.

Based on the principles of positive psychology, this study aims to investigate the mediating role of job characteristics (task, knowledge, social and work context) in the connection between lean manufacturing (LM) practices and employee well-being.

Employee well-being, encompassing job satisfaction, organizational affective commitment and work involvement, is conceptualized as a second-order construct. Using a proposed model, an online survey was administered to 520 participants across 23 operational sectors categories of the Brazilian manufacturing industry. The data is processed using structural equation analysis.

The research shows that the relationship between LM practices and employee well-being is partially mediated through three out of the four work characteristics (task, knowledge and social). In addition, LM exerts a direct and significant influence on employee well-being.

This study contributes to practical insights by encouraging industrial managers to refine their managerial work design. It highlights the importance of appropriately dimensioning tasks, nurturing social skills to enhance interactions and task execution and optimizing physical facilities to counteract potential initial-stage work intensification during LM implementation.

Previous research about organizational behavior extensively examines happiness at work, focusing on constructs such as well-being, satisfaction, commitment, engagement and motivation, but there is a lack of studies assessing employee well-being in the lean context, particularly from a positive perspective.

In this paper we explore the gendered ways in which academic staff resistance and compliance is configured in a post-1992 University in England, including the emotions implicated in the navigation of neo-liberalisation and research intensification of their academic institution and its associated disciplinarian mechanisms.

We draw on data from an interview study of a diverse sample of 32 academics of different gender, discipline and academic grade. Analysis informed by a feminist post-structuralist framework of power and discourse explored different forms of academic resistance and compliance; how the embodied academic subject was (re)negotiated within gendered discourses of neo-liberal research excellence and managerialism and the gendered emotions generated in processes of resistance and compliance.

Institutional change and expectations to engage with research performativity generated fear, anxiety and anger. Female staff appeared to actively resist the masculinized research subject performing all hours work and individualism in the context of private and institutional gendered relations and labour. Male staff though actively resisted the feminization of higher education and the neo-liberal instrumentalization of caring and therapeutic cultures and ideologically resisted the surveillance mechanisms of higher education including the REF.

Our work contributes to scholarship problematizing the assumed neutrality of resistance and compliance and highlighting women’s symbolic struggle to (dis)identify with a masculine professional norm. In terms of theorising academic resistance to neo-liberalism and identity construction, further attention should be given to the mobilization and symbolic capital of academics and emotions positioned differently due to their gender and intersecting differences.

Our study addresses a gap in the scholarship of academic resistance and compliance by advancing the understanding of gender inequalities and emotions implicated in the process of resistance and compliance against neo-liberalism.

This research investigates the personal experiences of hybrid workers, exploring their perspectives on their health and well-being when undertaking hybrid working arrangements. The research further explores how organisations can proactively support the health and wellbeing of hybrid workers, mitigating any potential health risks.

A cross-sectional, qualitative online survey was used to collect data from 412 hybrid workers. The data were analysed thematically. This approach allows for nuanced insights into the personal experiences of hybrid workers to be understood.

Findings indicate that employees who undertake hybrid work experience both positive and negative effects on their subjective well-being; hybrid work arrangement has the potential to act as a job resource or job demand. The study further identifies actions that can support healthy hybrid work that will be of value to organisations offering these working arrangements.

Although empirical research has previously examined the relationship between remote work and employee well-being, there is a lack of in-depth understanding about employees’ experiences of well-being whilst undertaking hybrid work – an emerging and relatively unexplored working arrangement. This research therefore addresses a significant gap in the literature by providing a deep understanding of how hybrid work influences employee well-being. Furthermore, previous research has not yet explored how hybrid worker health can be enabled and supported by organisations and individuals themselves.

This study investigates human resource (HR) professionals' experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study involves in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 37 HR professionals purposefully selected based on their prior involvement in managing pandemic-related challenges.

The findings reveal that HR professionals faced intensified organizational demands, leading to expanded job roles, increased workload, a change in pace and emotional pressures. However, participants exhibited resilience by drawing from and creating various job resources to cope with these demands. Our findings also show that despite HR professionals being central to creating workplace support and wellness initiatives, their well-being needs were often overlooked as they prioritized supporting others.

The study contributes to research on the experiences of HR professionals during the pandemic and to job-demands resources (JD-R) theory by incorporating context-specific demands, resources and coping strategies specific to HR professionals.

Lessons learned for organizations and HR professionals are discussed in relation to creating conditions of organizational support and resource availability for HR professionals.

This study extends research on the mental health and well-being of HR professionals during the pandemic by providing a novel lens on linkages between job demands, job resources and self-regulation strategies.