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Why did some individuals have relatively little trouble balancing work and home demands during the COVID-19 lockdown, while others felt overwhelmed? Although ample studies have recently been generated regarding COVID-19 employment challenges, this question has not yet received sufficient scholarly attention. This research integrates work–home conflict theories with the paradox-mindset framework, in order to suggest a new theoretical approach for understanding individual differences in addressing work–home conflict.

During the first two weeks of the COVID-19 epidemic in Israel, the author gathered 117 completed questionnaires from their colleagues in the Israeli higher-education system, who were working remotely and teaching online during the lockdown imposed to control the epidemic. Based on a path-model analysis, the author examined whether their experiences of strain and tension in the work domain might be indirectly and positively associated with workplace outcomes via positive associations between these experiences and paradox mindset, as well as negative associations between paradox mindset and work-to-home conflict (WTH) and home-to-work (HTW) conflict.

The study findings highlight the beneficial effect of paradox mindset on the experience of work–home conflict and its outcomes. Although working remotely has great potential to increase the strain and tension experienced by employees, applying a paradox mindset reduces the experience of work–home conflict and is positively associated with certain work outcomes.

This research integrates work–home conflict theories with the paradox-mindset framework. The beneficial effects of a paradox mindset on the experience of work–home conflict and its outcomes are highlighted.

The COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated a shift to remote working for previously office-based employees in South Africa, impacting employee outcomes such as well-being. The remote work trend is expected to continue even post the pandemic, necessitating for organizational understanding of the factors impacting employee well-being. Using the Job Demands–Resources model as the theoretical framework, this study aims to understand the role of job demands and resources as predictors of employee well-being in the pandemic context.

A self-administered online survey questionnaire was used to gather quantitative data about remote workers’ (n = 204) perceptions of specifically identified demands, resources and employee well-being. Descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation and moderated hierarchical regression were used to analyse the data.

This study found that job demands in the form of work–home conflict were associated with reduced employee well-being. Resources, namely, job autonomy, effective communication and social support were associated with increased employee well-being. Job autonomy was positively correlated to remote work frequency, and gender had a significant positive association to work–home conflict. Social support was found to moderate the relationship between work–home conflict and employee well-being. Findings suggest that organizations looking to enhance the well-being of their remote workforce should implement policies and practices that reduce the demands and increase the resources of their employees. The significant association of gender to work–home conflict suggests that greater interventions are required particularly for women. This study advances knowledge on the role of demands and resources as predictors of employee well-being of remote workforces during COVID-19 and beyond.

This paper provides insight on employee well-being during COVID-19 remote work. Further, the findings suggest that organizations looking to enhance the well-being of their remote workforce should implement policies and practices that reduce the demands and increase the resources of their employees. The significant association of gender to work–home conflict suggests that greater interventions are required particularly for women. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study carried out to explore the employee well-being during COVID-19 pandemic and will be beneficial to stakeholders for understanding the factors impacting employee well-being.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the tactics that mid-career professional working mothers use to improve their work-home balance.

The qualitative study used in-depth interviews with 63 Brazilian professional working mothers aged between 37 and 55, having at least one child under the age of 18, and living in dual-career households. The interviews were content analyzed.

The study reported four dimensions of boundary work tactics (behavioral, temporal, physical, and communicative) that mid-career working mothers adopted to construct a satisfying level of segmentation or integration between work and home.

The study suggests individual tactics for actively constructing a generalized work-home state that can be adopted by working mothers. Additionally, the authors suggest that HR managers should develop work-home balance programs that provide policies that adjust to the work-home boundary preferences for those mothers who want to integrate and segment these domains.

The authors hope this study can help mid-career working mothers to understand how they can interact actively with others in such a way that they can better answer their work and home demands.

This study was the first to use boundary work tactics theory to explore how mid-career professional working mothers improve their work-home balance.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, huge numbers of employees shifted to remote working, with various consequences for their family and working lives. This study aims to focus on the factors that affect their creativity while working from home. As individual creativity is shaped by context, the authors investigate the moderating role of the domestic environment on employees’ creative contributions while working remotely.

The authors base the arguments on the complexity perspective on innovative work behaviour (IWB) and consider innovation a recursive process in which innovative behaviour can inform, and not simply follow, subsequent creative acts. The sudden spur of the pandemic interrupted the natural recursiveness of the creativity–innovation process and allowed them to empirically investigate the direct and indirect effects that levels of pre-pandemic IWB had on individuals’ creative behaviour. The authors hypothesise that this relationship is moderated by two resource-conserving contextual factors: work–home conflict and a feeling of social isolation. The participants were 803 employees from several Italian corporations. The data were collected during the first lockdown period (April–May 2020).

The findings support the existence of a three-way interaction, suggesting that IWB affects further creative behaviours when both work–home conflict and social isolation are low.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that investigates what happened to employees’ creativity during the COVID-19 massive remote working situation. The results should be interpreted beyond the unique context because remote working will continue.

This study aims to examine the consequences of work–family conflict and explore the mechanism by which it influences organizational citizenship behavior from the perspective of changes in and preservation of family well-being (emotional resources).

Work–family conflict has always been an important research topic in the field of organizational behavior; scholars have studied the relationship between it and organizational citizenship behavior from different perspectives. To better understand the mechanism of work–family conflict on organizational citizenship behavior, we use a longitudinal design and analyze the multi-stage matching data of 209 employees and their superiors from six cities in southern China. The authors construct a theoretical model based on the conservation of resources theory to explore the mechanism by which work–family conflict influences organizational citizenship behavior when taking employees’ family well-being as a mediator and work–family segmentation preference as the boundary condition.

Work–family conflict has a significant negative effect on family well-being and this effect is moderated by work–home segmentation preferences. Work–family conflict also has a significant indirect effect on organizational citizenship behavior through family well-being and this indirect effect is enhanced by an increase in the level of preference for work–home segmentation.

This study enriches our knowledge of the moderating variables in the study of work–family relationships from the perspective of individual personality traits. It also provides a new perspective for the study of such relationships in the context of Chinese family culture.

The speedy development of information technology (IT) is indeed a significant issue to support the enterprises to spread their products and services to their customers. Although the adoption of IT in the enterprises can help employees' work, it will increase their work exhaustion and job burnout too.

The survey data of this study was collected from Chinese IT personnel (ITP): 543 and Chinese information systems (IS)/IT users: 525, totaling 1,068 respondents.

The result shows that the influences of the organizational factors and guanxi on the work exhaustion are different between Chinese ITP and IS/IT users in the research model. Also the implications of the study are discussed and made some contribution to the research and management practice.

By comparison between the Chinese ITP and IS/IT users, this study shows that guanxi can be antecedent factor to some organizational factors, and the organizational factors guanxi have had a different effect on the work exhaustion of Chinese ITP and IS/IT users. Given that the critical successes to the organizations, management should focus on what direction to reduce Chinese ITP and IS/IT users work exhaustion.

This study examines the role of Saudi women’s work motivational drivers on work–home conflict (WHC) and work–home enrichment (WHE). It considers the moderating role of psychological detachment from work during the evening between one workday and the next and how it impacts on the mediating role of WHC and WHE on work performance.

Drawing on self-determination theory and enrichment and depletion perspectives on the work–home interface, the study employs a quantitative lagged study over a period of three consecutive working days, with data collected from 358 Saudi women working in academia.

Moderated mediation structural equation modelling (MMSEM) analysis reveals that intrinsic motivation is significantly, positively related to WHE and home–work enrichment (HWE), whereas extrinsic motivation is only significantly and positively related to home–work conflict (HWC). Results show that detaching from work weakens the positive association between intrinsic motivation and HWE. In line with predictions, WHE is significantly, positively related to citizenship behaviour towards both individuals and organizations, whilst HWE is significantly related to citizenship behaviour towards individuals only. HWC is only significantly related to citizenship behaviour towards the organisation.

The research highlights the enriching experiences for Saudi women, who have the opportunity to pursue a career and highlight benefits of their ongoing empowerment.

This research brings a unique motivational perspective to work–life research and addresses a shortcoming of work–life research in considering an understudied culturally distinct population. It emphasises on the enriching experiences of Saudi women who have the opportunity to pursue a career, highlighting the benefits of their ongoing empowerment.

This study aims to examine the complex relationship between the personality meta-traits of stability and plasticity and time-based work–family conflict (WFC). Stability and plasticity are hypothesized to influence WFC directly and indirectly, via boundary strength at work (BSW) and boundary strength at home (BSH) domains. WFC has two dimensions – conflict due to family interfering in work (FIW) and conflict due to work interfering in family (WIF).

Data was collected from 419 full-time employees in multiple US companies. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling.

Stability was associated with lower levels of WFC and stronger boundaries around the work and home domains. BSW mediated the relationship between stability and FIW; BSH mediated the relationship between stability and WIF. plasticity was associated with weaker boundaries around the work and home domains. BSW and BSH had a negative relationship with FIW and WIF, respectively.

The study is cross-sectional and limited to time-based work–family conflict. The results support the adoption of a more agentic view of personality in the boundary setting and WFC literatures.

Employers need to design flexible work programs that offer employees control over work–home boundary strength.

The study links stability and plasticity to WFC. It expands the nomological network of work–home boundaries.

To understand how Indian first-time mothers in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) organisations returning to work cope with the perceived ideological psychological contract breaches from a work–home resources perspective.

This paper utilises interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) within the work–home resources (W-HR) model to analyse returning first-time mothers' lived experiences.

This study shows that significant life/work events such as childbirth/lack of career growth can trigger resource depletion at work and home and materialise in first-time mothers perceiving ideological psychological contract breaches at work. It has also been observed that key resource usage and macro support structures aid employees in attenuating work–home conflict by balancing contextual demands and personal resources. This study's participant accounts reveal that the recovery of volatile resources was possible by psychologically detaching and being silent.

The study offers a distinctive perspective by investigating the ideological PC breach experienced by first-time Indian mothers upon their organisational re-entry from a work–home resource model lens. Situated in a unique socio-cultural space and bringing forth the rich lived experiences of women working in the Indian STEM field, this paper explores how key resources shape the coping responses of first-time mothers in this context.

The main purpose of this research is to understand how the sudden shift to work from home (WFH) after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has caught several sales organizations underprepared and ill-equipped to combat emergent challenges. In this research, the authors provide initial evidence into how the WFH arrangement impacts salespeople and sales organizations. Specifically, this research is guided by two objectives: to understand how the shift to WFH environment is affecting salespeople, and to explore how organizations can mitigate dysfunctional effects of the shift to WFH practices and enhance salespeople’s commitment toward this new reality.

The authors did preliminary in-depth interviews with 13 executives operating in the business-to-business (B2B) space to identify themes that reflected the reality faced by B2B sales organizations when transitioning to WFH. The authors then conducted a quantitative study involving a survey with 130 B2B salespeople.

The findings from the qualitative research suggested that the WFH situation is quite different from the more traditional remote selling situations that B2B salespeople are used to. More specifically, salespeople experienced more anxiety because of the WFH situations. This finding was supported in the empirical study done by the authors where stress associated with WFH and job insecurity had a significant impact on salesperson anxiety.

The study primarily used subjective responses of salespeople with no objective measures. Furthermore, this study is cross-sectional in nature. Future research should build on the present work to understand the long-term consequences of WFH and factor in customer responses to the same. The impact of increased use of technology in the sales process will need further attention, including the sales management implication for the same.

Given the unforeseen nature of the COVID pandemic and how unprepared salespeople and sales organizations were to deal with it, this study is one of the first studies that documents the impact of WFH situations on salespeople.