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This paper aims to understand the antecedents and consequences of using the smartphone and/or tablet by professional accountants for business purposes outside of regular working hours. More specifically, this paper aims to test the direct relationships between, on the one hand, work intensification and the use of smartphone and/or tablet and work-family conflict (WFC) and on the other hand, the indirect effect of the use of smartphones and/or tablet between work intensification and WFC.

This research was based on a cross-sectional design and quantitative method. The structural equation method was used to test the direct effect of work intensification on smartphone and/or tablet use and WFC. As for the mediation effect of smartphone and/or tablet use between work intensification and WFC, it was tested by the method of indirect effects based on a bootstrap analysis. The statistical treatments were carried out with the AMOS software v.24.

The results of the study indicate that work intensification increases the use of smartphones and/or tablets outside of working hours and that this variable increases the intensification of WFC through a process of mediation.

This research does not take into account the moderating variables that can intervene in the model. For example, the duration of use of the smartphone, the origin of emails or messages (supervisors, customers and colleagues), the types of tasks performed outside working hours and the period of use (evening, weekend and holidays) could have significant effects on the different relationships tested in the model. Furthermore, we had all the positions held by the respondents (for example, chief financial officer, director, vice-president, partners, senior managers, management accountant, auditor, agents, analysts, accountants) grouped into one category and this may have an impact on results.

The results could be quite interesting for governments and organizations interested in advantage of the technology while reducing its disadvantages. In particular, it is important for accounting firms, which are big users of new technologies (e.g. Smart software and analytics). Indeed, both companies and professional accountants must clearly communicate their expectations regarding the use of technology for business purposes outside normal working hours.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to examine the effect of work intensification and the use of smartphones and/or tablets, on WFC.

The purpose of this paper is to explore psychological, social and work related health aspects of harm imposed on stakeholders, such as employees, their families and communities, by organizations while using efficiency based human resource management (HRM) practices.

The ethical issues of negative externality (NE) or harm of HRM practices are scrutinized using ethics of care for a stakeholders' perspective. Further, the conceptual framework of NE of HRM is used to analyse the psychological, social and work related health harm of one of the strategic HRM practices, work intensification, a widely used practice to improve the efficiency of employees.

It is evident from this article that NE of work intensification has become the major contributor to the psychological, social, and work related health aspects of harm on the stakeholders, and they as third parties render the costs for managing this harm.

The harm indicators and the associated costs are drawn from published research that was not conducted for the purpose of identifying the harm of the NE of HRM practices. Hence, it is suggested that it would be useful to develop a tool to measure the harmful effects of HRM practices on the stakeholders.

The analysis of NE of work intensification can help managers to be proactive in introducing sustainable HRM strategies so as to minimize the harms of NE of HRM practices.

The framework of NE of HRM provides a new insight that overutilization of human resources for maximizing an organisation's profit has an unsustainable impact on society.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the mediating role of stress between work intensification and musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) focusing on personal support workers (PSWs) in home and community care.

The analysis sample of 922 comes from the 2015 survey of PSWs employed in Ontario, Canada. The endogenous variable is self-reported MSDs, and the exogenous variable is work intensification. Stress, measured as symptoms of stress, is the mediating variable. Other factors shown in the literature as associated with stress and/or MSDs are included as control variables. Structural equation model regression analyses are presented.

The results show that stress mediates the effect of work intensification on PSW’s MSDs. Other significant factors included being injured in the past year, facing hazards at work and preferring less hours – all had positive and significant substantive effects on MSDs.

The survey is cross-sectional and not longitudinal or experimental in design, and it focuses on a single occupation in a single sector in Ontario, Canada and, as such, this can limit the generalizability of the results to other occupations and sectors.

For PSW employers including their human resource managers, supervisors, schedulers and policy-makers, the study recommends reducing work intensification to lower stress levels and MSDs.

The findings of this study contribute to the theory and knowledge by providing evidence on how work intensification can affect workers’ health and assist decision makers in taking actions to create healthy work environments.

Little is known about temporal trends in the intensification of work in America, or its determinants. This study analyzed two representative samples of the American labor force, and found that the pace of work increased significantly between 1977 and 1997. In a decomposition analysis, two-thirds of the increase in work intensification was attributable to objective economic changes, in particular job complexity and the length of work schedules. Future research should further explore the role of technology in quickening the pace of work, but not ignore the possibility that the demands of family life also affect perceptions of work intensification.

Increasing speed in many life domains is currently being discussed under the term “social acceleration” as a societal phenomenon which not only affects western societies, but may also lead to job demands arising from accelerated change. Demands such as work intensification and intensified learning and their changes over time may increase emotional exhaustion, but may also induce positive effects. The purpose of this paper is to examine how increases in demands arising from accelerated change affect employee well-being.

A total of 587 eldercare workers provided data on work intensification and intensified learning as well as on exhaustion and job satisfaction at two points in time.

Work intensification was negatively related to future job satisfaction and positively related to future emotional exhaustion, whereas intensified learning was positively associated with future job satisfaction and negatively with future emotional exhaustion.

Intensified demands represents a growing social as well as work-specific challenge which needs to be addressed by practitioners.

Using a longitudinal perspective this study is the first to examine the relationship of increases in work intensification and intensified learning with job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion at work.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an empirical investigation into the mediating effect of high-performance work systems (HPWS) on health harm (HH). The paper also examines the role of perceived organizational support (POS) and its indirect effect on work intensification (WI) and HH through HPWS. Further, the implications of the HH on individuals, organizations, families and societies are also presented. Recognizing the need for sustainable human resource management (HRM) practices that drive employee well-being and reducing HH is also highlighted.

Data for the study were collected using four established scales. The data collected from 345 executives were analyzed using the SPSS 25.0 Version and Amos 21.0.

The study confirmed that work intensification causes HH. The results also indicate the significant mediation of HPWS and the moderation of POS between WI and HH, thus suggesting the inevitability of HR intervention for implementing sustainable HRM practices, which reduce the negative harm of the work.

Data were collected from executives working in IT organizations in India. However, IT work exhibits broadly similar technology/platforms across the world and hence, applicable to the other contexts as well.

The study suggests that organizations should formulate policies and initiate interventions toward the care of employees, motivating toward higher performance and support them to prevent HH of work. It is difficult to categorize what comprises the care of employees in the current context of HPWS and treating employees as an end in itself. Generally, it is seen in terms of health and safety, work–life balance, remuneration, workload, job role and job design. People are core to sustainable development, and the HR must design and develop systems so that the organization can retain a healthy and productive workforce from a sustainability perspective. Moreover, sustainable work performance is a function of high resource levels of employees (energy, time and competences) and the allocation of resources, leading to resource regeneration. Hence, organizations need to source from a variety of sources and balance it for the sustainable performance of employees.

The HRM literature reveals the positive effect of POS on employee health, but studies that investigated the adverse impact of POS are notably absent. The study bridges this gap and is novel, as it explores the moderating role of POS on HPWS and HH and reaffirms the need for building sustainable organizations and sustainable HRM practices. Moreover, the paper provides contextual support to the literature, where studies relating to sustainable HRM practices in developing countries like India are absent.

The paper seeks to illuminate the intersection between doing greater good in the world and the self-disciplining that comes along with it. The paper raises a discussion on how purpose-driven organizations with a sustainability focus should be concerned about internal social sustainability in order to maintain consistency between external purpose and internal well-being of employees.

This article investigates the interrelations between purpose-driven organizations' quest for social sustainability and internal work conditions exemplified through experiences with work intensification. A governmentality studies approach is applied to investigate how employees' perceptions of doing greater good in the world also become a productive self-disciplining strategy that potentially increases work intensification and simultaneously result in an instrumentalization of working for greater sustainability.

Working with an organizational sustainability purpose can, in some situations, create dilemmas that may decrease employee well-being as it demands continuous negotiation of boundaries between paid work and free time, meaningfulness and work devotion, self-management and work intensification.

The paper raises a discussion on how purpose-driven organizations with a sustainability focus should be concerned about internal (social) sustainability in order to maintain consistency between external purpose and internal well-being of employees.

School-level leaders are suffering. They are experiencing a well-being crisis after years of working long work hours, managing an unrelenting workload, and navigating shifting policy contexts. School leaders that are experiencing work intensification and highly stressful work environments can suffer personal and professional consequences. On a professional level, school-level leaders are immersed in intensified work environments that mute the power and potential increasingly associated with their role. This chapter describes challenges that threaten school-level leaders' productivity, job satisfaction, happiness and well-being, such as work intensification, burnout, stress as well as loneliness and isolation. In these ways, the emotional aspects of their work can influence school-level leaders' ability to lead happy and healthy lives, while also having the supplementary effect of making the position less attractive for the next generation of school leaders. Research conducted in jurisdictions around the world is discussed throughout the chapter to demonstrate that the well-being crisis experienced by school leaders is an international phenomenon. I also use this discussion of the challenges facing contemporary school-level leaders to encourage them to reconnect with the reasons why, and the emotions they felt, when first pursuing a position in K-12 school-level leadership.

Robotic process automation (RPA) has been widely implemented to automate digital tasks. The resulting new type of human–bot co-working environment, however, has been understudied. This paper investigated how the depth and breadth of RPA deployment impact employees' job autonomy and work intensification, as well as perceived RPA performance. It further examined how job autonomy, work intensification, and perceived RPA performance predict burnout and continuance intention to use RPA.

Using data collected from online survey of 128 RPA users, whose organizations have already gone live on RPA, partial least squares is used in the validation of the conceptual model and analysis.

The analytical results indicate that RPA deployment breadth and depth affect work intensification differently, and RPA deployment breadth and depth significantly predict perceived RPA performance. While work intensification increases burnout, job autonomy alleviates the burnout of employees. Finally, job autonomy and perceived RPA performance are both positive predictors of continuance intention to use RPA.

This study contributes to the literature by investigating how co-working affects employees' autonomy and quality of work. It also advances the research on technology deployment by showing how deployment breadth and depth differently affect employees' evaluations of work-related aspects. Third, it extends the applicability of job demand-resource model into technology deployment and continuance technology use literature, by illustrating the importance of a job resource such as job autonomy. Finally, it provides firms with RPA implementation strategies.

Since the late 1970s, the study of the role, structure and functions of personnel management in the United Kingdom has been greatly facilitated by surveys emerging from a number of large‐scale surveys. A major interest in interpreting the data from these surveys has been to evaluate the impact of recession, and, latterly, recovery on the power, structure and roles of personnel departments and personnel specialists in recent years. The survey data are used comparatively to evaluate the empirical plausibility of the different scenarios which have arisen, and to account for the results that emerge.