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During the COVID-19 pandemic, many working mothers in India adopted involuntary telecommuting work option for the first time. However, no research explored their adjustments and experiences in the new work setting. This paper aims to gain an in-depth understanding of Indian working mothers' lived experience of involuntary telecommuting.

A phenomenological research design was adopted. The authors conducted 14 in-depth, semi-structured telephonic and online interviews. Data were analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis framework.

The data analysis yielded two interconnected superordinate themes in this research: (1) characteristics of involuntary telecommuting and (2) the impact of involuntary telecommuting. Under the first theme, four sub-themes emerged: long working hours, increased family demands, reduced interaction with coworkers and technology-enabled communication with supervisors. The second theme comprised five sub-themes: time-based work interference with family, time-based family interference with work, strain-based family interference with work, absence of emotional and professional support and performance management concerns. Involuntary telecommuting mothers faced challenges due to lack of control over their daily work schedule and demands, along with an increased burden of unpaid household work, leading to difficulties in managing their work schedule and negotiating their professional role identity within the family. These findings emphasize that working mothers who participated in involuntary telecommuting encountered bidirectional time-based conflicts and unidirectional strain-based conflict.

The study examines a particular subset of women telecommuters who were working mothers with young children. These potential limitations are to be addressed in future research.

The findings suggest that managers should develop HR policies and telecommuting ecosystems in order to enhance effectiveness of telecommuting. Specifically, organizations offering telecommuting work options should create opportunities for informal interaction among peers and formal one-to-one interaction with managers. Moreover, HR managers should develop and implement employee-friendly telecommuting policies.

The research contributes to HRM and gender literature.

The paper contributes to the discourses of work-life balance, workplace relationships and work policies within telecommuting literature.

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.

This exploratory paper aims to examine attitudes and practices with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the effects of mandatory teleworking from home in the wake of the first state of emergency orders in Japan in 2020.

An online survey of married employees retrospectively assessed changes in work style, subjective well-being, work–family conflict and job performance before and during forced teleworking from home in Tokyo and three of the surrounding prefectures.

Regular employees reported high levels of anxiety and to have thoroughly implemented government-recommended hygiene and safety practices. A majority of respondents were satisfied with mandatory telework from home and desired to continue partial telework after the end of the pandemic. The strongest predictor of satisfaction with mandatory telework from home turned out to be adequate workspace at home for both men and women. However, the antecedents of the desire to continue working from home differed by gender.

These findings can help individuals, firms and governments better understand the effects of mandatory teleworking from home and devise countermeasures to maximize employee well-being and job performance. This is all the more crucial, as Japan has had successive waves of the virus and has declared numerous states of emergency since the beginning of the pandemic, forcing office workers to continue social distancing and remote working for the time being.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is one of the first to provide insights on how imposed teleworking from home in the context of COVID-19 in Japan affected regular employees’ personal and professional lives and to identify predictors of satisfaction with teleworking and the desire to continue doing so.

This paper aims to study the relationship between working while studying in college/university and education mismatch among employed youth in the Zambian labour market.

The study uses data from the 2014 School-to-Work Transition Survey and a multinomial logit model to examine three education-mismatch categories: undereducated, matched and overeducated. The paper also examines heterogeneities by education level and gender and uses empirical and subjective approaches of education mismatch.

The evidence shows that employed youth who worked while studying have a higher likelihood of having well-matched jobs. The subgroup analysis by education level reveals no significant relationship between working while studying among employed youth with higher education (secondary and above). However, employed youth with lower education (primary and lower) are less likely to be mismatched for the job. The linkage between the education system and the labour market needs to be strengthened to support a smoother school-to-work transition for youth. Additional support to enable exposure to the right type of work during youth's college or university studies could increase job match and reduce labour market inefficiencies.

The paper provides insights into a significant challenge faced by youth in developing countries, i.e. finding a suitable job for youth's level of education.

The world of work is constantly changing. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced working from home, and there is an increasing demand for flexibility regarding the workplace. There is little empirical evidence on the mechanisms and factors that influence employee outcomes, such as productivity and turnover intention, at the workplace and at home. In addition, it is unclear whether the workplace characteristics that influence employee outcomes vary between different nations due to country-specific circumstances. The paper aims to address these two issues.

The research model applied in this study is based on the job demands-resources (JD-R) and environmental demands-resources models using German (n = 429) and USA (n = 507) survey samples. Partial least squares structural equation modelling is used to analyse the influence of workplace characteristics (isolation, family–work interference, equipment/facilities and skill variety) on employee outcomes (satisfaction, burnout, productivity and turnover intention). Additionally, a multi-group analysis is used to explore group differences in the factors influencing satisfaction, burnout, productivity and turnover intention between employees in Germany and the USA.

The results reveal that significant determinants of productivity and turnover intention include isolation, family–work interference, equipment/facilities and skill variety. Isolation and equipment/facilities are identified as the most important demands and resources of the home workplace. Some significant differences are found between Germany and the USA. The positive effect of isolation on burnout is significantly stronger in the USA than in Germany, whereas the positive effect of family–work inference on burnout is stronger in Germany than in the USA. The negative effects visible for the relations between burnout and satisfaction, and satisfaction and turnover intention are stronger in Germany than in the USA. The positive effect of burnout on turnover intention is stronger in the USA compared to Germany.

The study adds empirical evidence to the JD-R theory by analysing the influence of the home workplace characteristics on employee outcomes in different countries for the first time using a multi-group analysis. In addition, the study reveals new insights into the differences between the knowledge workforces in Germany and the USA by uncovering how key factors influence employee outcomes such as productivity and turnover intention, partially carried by varying length of experience in work from home between both of these countries. Insights from this study can support corporate real estate managers to make better decisions on the design of employees’ home workplaces and the integration of work from home into the company’s workspace concept.

Activity sampling is a technique to monitor onsite labourers' time utilisation, which can provide helpful information for the management level to implement suitable labour productivity improvement strategies continuously. However, there needs to be a review paper that compiles research on activity sampling studies to give readers a thorough grasp of the research trend. Hence, this paper aims to investigate the activity sampling techniques applied in earlier research from the angles of activity categories formation, data collection methods and data analysis.

The method used in this paper is a systematic review guided by the PRISMA framework. The search was conducted in Scopus and Web of Science. The inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied, selecting 70 articles published between 2011 and 2022 for data extraction and analysis. The analysis method involved a qualitative synthesis of the findings from the selected articles.

Activity sampling is broadly divided into four stages: targeting trade, determining activity categories, data collection and data analysis. This paper divides the activity categories into three levels and classifies the data collection methods into manual observation, sensor-based activity sampling and computer vision-based activity sampling. The previous studies applied activity sampling for two construction management purposes: labour productivity monitoring and ergonomic safety monitoring. This paper also further discusses the scientific research gaps and future research directions.

This review paper contributes to the body of knowledge in construction management by thoroughly understanding current state-of-the-art activity sampling techniques and research gaps.

Drawing on conservation of resources theory, this study aims to examine the relationship between temporal leadership (TL) and employees’ thriving at work (TW) by focusing on the positive mediating role of perception of work-goal progress (PWP), the negative mediating roles of job-based psychological ownership (JPO) and the moderating role of synchrony preference (SP).

We employed a dedicated data collection platform called Credamo for two waves of online questionnaires in China between March 2022 and April 2022. A total of 326 questionnaires were collected and analyzed to test the hypotheses.

(1) TL directly and positively affects TW. (2) TL indirectly and positively affects TW via PWP. (3) TL indirectly and negatively affects TW via JPO. (4) SP positively moderates the positive mediating effect of PWP on the relationship between TL and TW. (5) SP negatively moderates the negative mediating effect of JPO on the relationship between TL and TW.

Supervisors in organizations ought to discreetly practice TL and try to maximize the positive role of PWP and minimize the negative role of JPO.

The findings simultaneously discuss the effects of TL on TW from dark and bright perspectives. The influence of interaction between contextual and individual features on TW is also specified.

This article reports the results of a randomized field experiment that tested the effects of a new business intervention among managers of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in England.

Individual managers (learners) were randomly assigned in clusters (companies) to either an intervention group (265 learners; 40 SMEs) receiving a novel virtual, blended training program designed to stimulate a change in management behavior or a no-intervention group (118 learners; 22 SMEs).

The results show that the primary objective of changing management behavior to use more of an Operational Coaching™ style of management has been achieved (to a statistically significant level), and this is against the backdrop of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic. Positive trends in SME productivity metrics were also observed in the intervention group companies.

These important results could be indicative of the economic and productivity impact that a change in management behavior could have, and they warrant serious further investigation.

As after-hours technology-mediated work (ATW) becomes common in organizations, the increased workload and interference to life caused by ATW has induced employee turnover. This research develops a mediated moderation model to explain how employees' intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for ATW affect their turnover intention through work–life conflict.

A survey was conducted to collect data of 484 employees from Chinese companies. Partial Least Square was used to perform data analysis.

The results show that intrinsic motivation for ATW has an indirect negative impact on turnover intention via work–life conflict, whereas extrinsic motivation for ATW has both a positive direct impact and a positive indirect impact (via work–life conflict) on turnover intention. This study also helps find that time spent on ATW can strengthen the positive impact of extrinsic motivation for ATW on turnover intention but has no moderation effect on the impact of intrinsic motivation for ATW. Furthermore, this study reveals that the interaction effect of time spent on ATW and extrinsic motivation on turnover intention is mediated by employees' perceived work–life conflict.

By discovering the distinct impact of employees' intrinsic and extrinsic motivations for ATW on turnover intention, this research provides a contingent view regarding the impact of ATW and offers guidance to managers regarding how to mitigate ATW-induced turnover intention through fostering different motivations.