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The main aims of the paper were to explore the role of information and communication technology (ICT) in shaping the work-life balance of managers working remotely and to identify individual recovery strategies and organisational interventions to support digital managers. The theoretical background was based on the work-family border theory and the effort-recovery model.

A semi-structured individual in-depth interview (IDI) was used as the research method. The research group consisted of 13 managers from companies in Poland representing various industries. In all, 560 min of recordings and 201 pages of text were obtained and subsequently coded and categorised.

The results showed that remote managers struggle with the work-life imbalance and blurred boundaries between work and private roles, as well as difficulties in maintaining digital hygiene. The use of ICT enables high flexibility but contributes to work-life conflict. Managers who work from home experience a constant workload and suffer from impaired recovery. The use of ICT creates a need to recover and maintain digital hygiene. However, there are constraints that impede managers' recovery attempts. Many feel that their work does not allow to recover but requires to be “always on” to help their subordinates fulfil their responsibilities, even though they do not expect their subordinates to work after hours. Finally, managers perceive organisational support as insufficient or inappropriate for their needs. They admit that they do not participate in organisational interventions due to lack of time and do not believe that they help them to maintain or restore their well-being.

The role of ICT in blurring the boundaries between work and private roles was explored in depth, as was the “always on” phenomenon as a factor contributing to the tension between the need to recover and the inability to engage in recovery activities. The study has practical implications for integrating individual and organisational approaches to well-being and identifies solutions to encourage managers to maintain digital hygiene and mental health.

Healthcare professionals are key in healthcare organisations but are subject to long working hours and may have to make complex life-and-death decisions. As frontline agents dealing with human lives, giving them a voice is paramount. This study explores the impact of employee voice (assessed based on employee perceptions on how much they are consulted and how much influence they have on task-related decisions) on health professionals' work engagement and burnout when mediated by relational outcomes (perceived organisational support, workplace trust, workplace recognition and meaningful work).

A sample of 3,266 health professionals retrieved from the European Working Condition Survey was used. The quantitative analysis was performed using the partial least square structural equation modelling and multiple regression analyses.

The results indicate that employee voice has a direct positive impact on work engagement, but employee voice's direct effects on burnout still need to be confirmed. Relational outcomes are found to mediate the relationship between employee voice and burnout (decreasing it) and between employee voice and work engagement (increasing it).

Practices of employee voice in the workplace are fundamental to promoting health professionals' well-being. Trust, recognition, support and the feeling of doing meaningful work increase the influence of employee voice, especially in reducing the levels of burnout.

This is the first study that assesses, at a European level, the importance that ‘giving health professionals a voice' has on crucial employee outcomes: work engagement, burnout and relational outcomes.

The purpose of this study is to examine the rostering practices and work experiences of medical scientists at four health services in the Australian public healthcare sector. There are over 16,000 medical scientists (AIHW, 2019) in Australia responsible for carrying out pathology testing to help save the lives of thousands of patients every day. However, there are systemic shortages of medical scientists largely due to erratic rostering practices and workload issues. The purpose of this paper is to integrate evidence-based human resource management (EBHRM), the LAMP model and HR analytics to enhance line manager decision-making on rostering to support the wellbeing of medical scientists.

Using a qualitative methodological approach, the authors conducted 21 semi-structured interviews with managers/directors and nine focus groups with 53 medical scientists, making a total 74 participants from four large public hospitals in Australia.

Across four health services, manual systems of rostering and management decisions do not meet the requirements of the enterprise agreement (EA) and impact negatively on the wellbeing of medical scientists in pathology services. The authors found no evidence of the systematic approach of the organisations and line managers to implement the LAMP model to understand the root causes of rostering challenges and negative impact on employees. Moreover, there was no evidence of sophisticated use of HR analytics or EBHRM to support line managers' decision-making regarding mitigation of rostering related challenges such as absenteeism and employee turnover.

The authors contribute to HRM theory by integrating EBHRM, the LAMP model (Boudreau and Ramstad, 2007) and HR analytics to inform line management decision-making. The authors advance understandings of how EBHRM incorporating the LAMP model and HR analytics can provide a systematic and robust process for line managers to make informed decisions underpinned by data.

Increasingly, emerging information technologies such as shared software and continuous accounting are offering alternative ways to perform accounting tasks in a supposedly more efficient fashion. Yet, few studies have investigated how they affect the provision of accounting services, especially in the context of small accounting firms, which provide legal and tax services to entrepreneurs and businesses. Drawing on the service perspective, the paper critically examines how technological innovation challenges and reconfigures the co-production of accounting services in these firms.

The paper answers calls issued in prior studies to conduct empirical research on emerging information technologies for accountants. It focuses on the specific context of small accounting firms and draws on interviews with small accounting firms' managers (n = 20).

The study emphasizes five significant challenges that accounting firm managers face when using information technologies to support the provision of their services (ensuring reliability, factoring in their heterogeneous client base, repricing, training clients to use new technologies and promoting advisory services). Information technologies are shown to have a structuring role in the co-production of accounting services, as they lead to reconfigurations of the relationships between accountants and their clients. A range of four configurations is developed to highlight accountants' strategies to maintain collaborative relationships with their clients while integrating new technologies into their work practices.

By conceptualizing accounting services as a co-production process, the paper offers new insights into the implications of emerging information technologies for small accounting firms.

Positive experiences with working from home (WFH) during the Corona pandemic (COVID-19) have motivated many employees to continue WFH after the pandemic. However, factors influencing employees' WFH intentions against the backdrop of experiences during pandemic-induced enforced working from home (EWFH) are heterogeneous. This study investigates factors linked to information technology (IT) professionals' WFH intentions.

This mixed-methods study with 92 IT professionals examines the effects of seven predictors for IT professionals' WFH intentions. The predictors are categorized according to the trichotomy of (1) characteristics of the worker, (2) characteristics of the workspace and (3) the work context. Structural equation modeling is used to analyze the quantitative survey data. In addition, IT professionals' responses to six open questions in which they reflect on past experiences and envision future work are examined.

Quantitative results suggest that characteristics of the worker, such as segmentation preference, are influencing WFH intentions stronger than characteristics of the workspace or the work context. Furthermore, perceived productivity during EWFH and gender significantly predict WFH intentions. Contextualizing these quantitative insights, the qualitative data provides a rich yet heterogeneous list of factors why IT professionals prefer (not) to work from home.

Reasons influencing WFH intentions vary due to individual preferences and constraints. Therefore, a differentiated organizational approach is recommended for designing future work arrangements. In addition, the findings suggest that team contracts to formalize working patterns, e.g. to agree on the needed number of physical meetings, can be helpful levers to reduce the complexity of future work that is most likely a mix of WFH and office arrangements.

This study extends literature reflecting on COVID-19-induced changes, specifically the emerging debate about why employees want to continue WFH. It is crucial for researchers and practitioners to understand which factors influence IT professionals' WFH intentions and how they impact the design and implementation of future hybrid work arrangements.

The core emphasis of the paper is to inspect the relationships between managerial leadership, employee happiness and turnover intentions among academicians of private universities in Punjab.

The proposed study used a descriptive research methodology and a structured instrument to collect responses from individuals (n = 400) using a purposive sampling method. SPSS and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) are applied to evaluate the data.

The outcomes disclosed that managerial leadership has a substantial effect on employee happiness (ß = 0.591, p < 0.05) and turnover intentions (ß = 0.566, p < 0.05). Besides this, it has been discovered that employee happiness mediates the association among managerial leadership and turnover intentions. The present research is among the few empirical findings that have examined academicians' perspectives on their turnover intentions in private universities.

By concentrating on effective managerial leadership and employee happiness, the analysis will be advantageous for human resource (HR) managers and authorities of private universities to strengthen academician retention. Therefore, the study adds something novel to the corpus of extant literature.

The study principally aims to investigate the relationship among work–life balance (WLB), job satisfaction (JS) and employee commitment (EC) among the railway staff by integrating the social exchange theory (SET). The study also explores JS as a mediator in the context of the new normal.

A mixed-method sequential explanatory design was utilized for this study. The research instrument was administered to 533 railway employees, using purposive sampling to ensure reliability and validity. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed to analyze the quantitative data and measure mediation effects. Additionally, 15 interviews were conducted with employees from three job positioning groups (A, B and C) to gain further insights into commitment-related concerns.

The study found that WLB and JS positively influenced EC, with JS acting as a mediator between WLB and EC. Furthermore, factors such as fostering friendships among colleagues, effectively managing work–life integration and recognizing the importance of job roles were identified as crucial in enhancing the relationship between WLB and EC.

The study includes SET to examine the social exchange process while considering WLB benefits as a reward from the employer and EC as the outcome of this reward. This study contributes by examining the effects of COVID-19 on the railway industry and EC. The mixed-methods sequential explanatory design gave a comprehensive understanding of the relationships between WLB, JS and EC. The study’s implications highlight the importance of implementing supportive policies, such as flexible work schedules and a supportive organizational culture, to enhance employee commitment and reduce attrition rates. The study emphasizes the significance of prioritizing employee well-being to achieve organizational goals and enhance organizational commitment.

This paper aims to explore how historical context influences the content and selection of rhetorical legitimation strategies. Using case study method, this paper will focus on how insurance companies and labor tried to defend their legitimacy in the context of enactment of Medicare in the USA. What factors influenced the strategic (rhetorical) decisions made by insurance companies and labor unions in their institutional work?

The study is empirically grounded in archival research, involving an analysis of over 9,000 pages of congressional hearings on Medicare covering the period 1958–1965.

The authors show that rhetorical legitimation strategies depend significantly on the specific historical circumstances in which those strategies are used. The historical context lent credibility to certain arguments and organizations are forced to decide either to challenge widely held assumptions or take advantage of them. The authors show that organizations face strong incentives to pursue the latter option. Here, both the insurance companies and labor unions tried to show that their positions were consistent with classical liberal ideology, because of high respect of classical liberal principles among different stakeholders (policymakers, voters, etc.).

It is uncertain how much the results of the study could be generalized. More information about the organizations whose use of rhetorics the authors studied could have strengthened our conclusions.

The practical relevancy of the revised paper is that the authors should not expect hegemony challenging rhetorics from organizations, which try to influence legislators (and perhaps the larger public). Perhaps (based on the findings), this kind of rhetorics is not even very effective.

The paper helps to understand better how organizations try to advance their interests and gain acceptance among the stakeholders.

In this paper, the authors show how historical context in practice influence rhetorical arguments organizations select in public debates when their goal is to influence the decision-making of their audience. In particular, the authors show how dominant ideology (or ideologies) limit the options organizations face when they are choosing their strategies and arguments. In terms of the selection of rhetorical justification strategies, the most pressing question is not the “real” broad based support of certain ideologies. Insurance company and labor union representatives clearly believed that they must emphasize liberal values (or liberal ideology) if they wanted to gain legitimacy for their positions. In existing literature, it is often assumed that historical context influence the selection of rhetorical strategies but how this in fact happens is not usually specified. The paper shows how interpretations of historical contexts (including the ideological context) in practice influence the rhetorical strategies organizations choose.

The burnout, stress, and work-life balance challenges faced by teachers have received renewed interest due to the myriad disruptions and changes to K-12 schooling brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even prior to the pandemic, relatively little was known about teachers' time use outside of the classroom, the blurring of work and home boundaries, and how teachers compare to similar professionals in these regards. We use daily time-diary data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) for 3,168 teachers and 1,886 professionals in similarly prosocial occupations from 2003 to 2019 to examine occupational differences in time use. Compared to observationally similar non-teachers, teachers spend significantly more time volunteering at their workplace and completing work outside the workplace during the school year. On average, teachers spend 19 more minutes working outside of the workplace on weekdays than observably similar non-teachers and 38 more minutes on weekends. The weekend disparity is particularly large among secondary school teachers. This suggests that before the widespread switch to online and hybrid learning necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers were already navigating blurrier work-life boundaries than their counterparts in similar professions. This has important implications for teacher turnover and for the effectiveness and wellness of teachers who remain in the profession.