This Special Issue reprint consists of 10 research articles published in “Challenges in Work and Employment during the COVID-19 Pandemic. The authors, originating from six countries, have studied ...different professional and occupational groups during the pandemic. Their topics range from theoretical analysis of remote work to the experiences of self-leadership, and from new types of job demands to new support needs required to experience relatedness in the pandemic era.
The reprint “Sustainable Healthy Working Life for All Ages—Work Environment, Age Management and Employability” provide an outlet of research contributing to the development of theoretical and ...practical knowledge influencing people’s working life. Working life is complex and there are many different factors that influence, such as the demographic change, pandemic and rapid technological development, etc., which place constantly changing demands on both employees, organizations/companies and society in different countries. This reprint covers new knowledge, as identified factors and areas that affect employees' ability to work to an older age, interventions and measures that enable a healthy and sustainable working life throughout the entire working life journey, from young to senior employees. The reprint also addresses the pressured work situation of school leaders in managing the education of children and young people in society, and what makes them stay or leave their jobs. In addition, the reprint addresses the way in which the Covid-19 pandemic has affected working life, not least for the health care professional groups and organizations.
To protect workers' safety while gradually resuming on-site operations amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations are offering employees the flexibility to decide their work location on a daily ...basis (i.e., whether to work from home or to work in the office on a particular day). However, little is known about what factors drive employees' daily decisions to work from home versus office during the pandemic. Taking a social ecological perspective, we conceptualize employees' daily choice of work location (home vs. office) as a way to cope with stressors they have encountered on the previous day, and conducted a daily diary study to examine how five categories of work-related and COVID-related stressors during the pandemic (identified through a pilot interview study) may jointly predict employees' next-day work location. We collected data over five workdays from 127 participants working in a Chinese IT company which allowed employees to choose their work location on a daily basis amid the pandemic. We found that experiencing more work-family boundary stressors and work coordination stressors on a certain day were associated with a greater likelihood of working in the office (vs. at home) on the next day, while experiencing more workload stressors prompted employees to work at home (vs. in the office) on the next day. Furthermore, we found that COVID-19 infection-related stressors moderated the effects of technology stressors and workload stressors on next-day work location. Our research findings offer implications for understanding the driving factors of daily work location choices during and beyond the pandemic.
The objective of this article is to provide a theoretical framework explaining positive and negative work-home processes integrally. Using insights from conservation of resources theory, we explain ...how personal resources (e.g., time, energy, and mood) link demanding and resourceful aspects of one domain to outcomes in the other domain. The resulting work-home resources (W-HR) model describes work-home conflict as a process whereby demands in one domain deplete personal resources and impede accomplishments in the other domain. Enrichment is described as a process of resource accumulation: Work and home resources increase personal resources. Those personal resources, in turn, can be utilized to improve home and work outcomes. Moreover, our resource approach to the work-home interface allows us to address two other issues that have thus far lacked a solid theoretical foundation. The W-HR model also explains how conditional factors such as personality and culture may influence the occurrence of work-home conflict and enrichment. Furthermore, the model allows us to examine how work-home conflict and enrichment develop over time. Finally, the model provides useful insights for other psychology subdisciplines, such as gender studies and developmental psychology.
Work in our modern society that is facilitated by communication technology involves connectivity, immediacy, and a blurring of boundaries between work and non‐work domains. This 4‐day quantitative ...diary study (N = 100 employees, N = 367–400 data points) aims to shed light on the relationship between daily smartphone use and daily work–home interference (WHI). Two potential moderators of this relationship are examined: (1) (strong) social norms represented by the influence of colleagues and supervisors regarding availability after work hours and (2) work engagement. Overall, the results of multilevel analyses were in line with the hypotheses. The findings suggest that supervisors should be clear about their expectations regarding smartphone use in private hours in that they should not expect employees to be always available. In addition we conclude that engaged workers can prevent work from interfering too much with their private lives, even when they use their smartphones during evening hours.
Practitioner points
Employees working in an ‘always‐on’ culture experience more WHI.
Important role models, such as supervisors, should be aware that the emails they send during evening hours and weekends also have recipients.
Supervisors should be careful in creating expectations regarding availability when they decide to provide smartphones to their employees.
Based on current conceptualizations of enrichment, or the positive side of the work–family interface, a multi-dimensional measure of work–family enrichment is developed and validated using five ...samples. The final 18 item measure consists of three dimensions from the work to family direction (development, affect, and capital) and three dimensions from the family to work direction (development, affect, and efficiency). The validity of the scale was established by assessing the content adequacy, dimensionality, reliability, factor structure invariance, convergent validity, divergent validity, and its relationship to work and family correlates.
This article integrates research on gendered organizations and the work-family interface to investigate an innovative workplace initiative. the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), implemented in ...the corporate headquarters of Best Buy, Inc. While flexible work policies common in other organizations "accommodate" individuals, this initiative attempts a broader and deeper critique of the organizational culture. We address two research questions: How does this initiative attempt to change the masculinized ideal worker norm? And what do women's and men's responses reveal about the persistent ways that gender structures work and family life? Data demonstrate the ideal worker norm is pervasive and powerful, even as employees begin critically examining expectations regarding work time that have historically privileged men. Employees' responses to ROWE are also gendered. Women (especially mothers) are more enthusiastic, while men are more cautious. Ambivalence about and resistance to change is expressed in different ways depending on gender and occupational status.
Good Jobs, Bad Jobs provides an insightful analysis of how and why precarious employment is gaining ground in the labor market and the role these developments have played in the decline of the middle ...class. Kalleberg shows that by the 1970s, government deregulation, global competition, and the rise of the service sector gained traction, while institutional protections for workers—such as unions and minimum-wage legislation—weakened. Together, these forces marked the end of postwar security for American workers. The composition of the labor force also changed significantly; the number of dual-earner families increased, as did the share of the workforce comprised of women, non-white, and immigrant workers. Of these groups, blacks, Latinos, and immigrants remain concentrated in the most precarious and low-quality jobs, with educational attainment being the leading indicator of who will earn the highest wages and experience the most job security and highest levels of autonomy and control over their jobs and schedules. Kalleberg demonstrates, however, that building a better safety net—increasing government responsibility for worker health care and retirement, as well as strengthening unions—can go a long way toward redressing the effects of today’s volatile labor market. There is every reason to expect that the growth of precarious jobs—which already make up a significant share of the American job market—will continue. Good Jobs, Bad Jobs deftly shows that the decline in U.S. job quality is not the result of fluctuations in the business cycle, but rather the result of economic restructuring and the disappearance of institutional protections for workers. Only government, employers and labor working together on long-term strategies—including an expanded safety net, strengthened legal protections, and better training opportunities—can help reverse this trend.
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