Session Type: Paper Session
Program Session: 6 | Submission: 17427 | Sponsor(s): (OB)
Virtual session type: Synchronous Live Presenter
Scheduled: Friday, Jul 30 2021 5:00AM - 6:30AM ET (UTC-4)
 
Non-Traditional Work Arrangements Research

Digital Session Chair: Kapil Verma, Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode
OB: Adapting to Work-From-Home: Examining the Benefits and Costs of Psychological Detachment from Home
Author: Kapil Verma, Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode
Author: Marilyn Ang Uy, Nanyang Technological U.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced organizations to shift to remote working to mitigate the spread of the disease. From the employees’ perspective, working from home comes with its own set of challenges. Because the boundary between work and home gets even more blurred as employees work from home, staying focused on their job while being at home takes a great amount of effort and results in higher levels of anxiety and fatigue. Can psychological detachment from home help employees in adapting to work-from-home arrangements? Focusing on this question, we integrate boundary theory and self-regulation theory to examine how and when psychological detachment from home influences daily work engagement and enacted incivility. We conducted an experience sampling study across two work weeks with employees working from home in India during the reopening phase after the nationwide lockdown. Our findings indicate that detachment from home is negatively related with next-morning work-related anxiety, which further impacts state work engagement and enacted incivility. Results also show that detachment from home is positively related with next-morning exhaustion, which in turn predicts state engagement and enacted incivility. Further, the indirect effects of detachment from home on daily engagement and enacted incivility via exhaustion were significant only for employees with low trait self-control. Overall, our study yields theoretical and practical implications for work-from-home practices even after the COVID-19 crisis ends.
Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
OB: Essential but Undervalued: Essentials Are Less Engaged, Prosocial, Supportive, and More Exhausted
Author: Arianna M. Beetz, The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania
Author: Hakan Ozcelik, California State U. Sacramento
This study aims to explore whether and how the organizational mandates imposed on employees during a large-scale disruptive event, i.e., COVID-19 regarding their work modality: on-site (essentials), from home (virtuals), or combination of both (hybrids), impact employees’ attitudes, motivation, and wellbeing. We drew on organizational-based self-esteem research and the research on crisis management to develop a model predicting that essential employees perceive these organizational mandates as a cue to how much they are valued by their organization, as reflected by their organization-based self-esteem, which in turn should be related to their work engagement, prosocial behavior, willingness to support the organization, and emotional exhaustion. We also considered an employee’s supervisor’s expression of companionate love and level of enjoying working on-site as factors moderating these relationships. We have conducted a field study in a metropolitan municipality to test our model. The sample consisted of 792 employees from a wide range of occupations. Results provided strong support for our model to show that essentials employees who were mandated to work onsite experienced lower levels of OBSE as compared to other employees, which in turn was related to negative work outcomes. Limitations, implications and future research direction were discussed.
Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
OB: Worker Affectivity and Work Attitudes: A Meta-Analysis of Mechanical Turk Samples
Author: Jestine Philip, U. of New Haven
Author: Vasiliki Kosmidou, U. of New Haven
The purpose of this paper is to meta-analyze the relationship between (positive and negative) affect and work attitudes (job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intentions) for Mechanical Turk data samples. MTurk has become a popular convenience sample choice for OB/HR scholars. MTurk workers are also part of the evolving digital gig economy, for whom the attitudinal and behavioral outcomes may differ from traditional employees due to the former’s varying employment relationships. We analyzed a total of 50 papers and 55 unique samples consisting of 23,427 MTurkers for PA studies and 14,798 MTurkers for NA studies. Consistent with conventionally sourced samples, PA was positively related to job satisfaction and organizational commitment and NA was negatively related to turnover intentions. The effect size magnitude for MTurker job satisfaction was statistically different and higher than conventional samples. Implications and the need to conduct such meta-analytic reviews for other attitudinal and behavioral outcome variables for MTurkers are discussed.
Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
OB: The Balancing Act between Privacy & Communication in Activity-based Workspaces: a Longitudinal Study
Author: Marc Rücker, Friedrich-Alexander U. of Erlangen-Nürnberg
Author: Tobias Eismann, Eureka Innovation
Author: Martin Meinel, Eureka Innovation
Author: Kai-Ingo Voigt, Friedrich-Alexander U. of Erlangen-Nürnberg
For many decades, companies have been trying to increase the performance of their employees using suitable office concepts. However, all conventional offices, such as private or open-plan offices, offer employees either a high degree of privacy or communication. But both of these dimensions are important when employees have to perform different tasks and are the prerequisite for employee performance. The literature defines this as the privacy-communication trade-off. So-called activity-based workspaces (ABWs), with their mixture of open and closed spaces, offer promising conditions for eliminating this trade-off. However, there is still no scientific evidence whether ABWs can actually solve the privacy-communication trade-off. Therefore, we accompanied a company for one year during their move from a conventional office to an ABW and surveyed the employees once before and twice after the move (n=86). In this longitudinal study, we were able to measure both a significant increase in perceived privacy and communication in the new work environment. Previously, these two dimensions were considered incompatible in only one work environment. Our study is therefore the first to show that ABWs are the ideal office concept to provide an appropriate level of privacy and communication and thus offer the best conditions for increasing employee performance.
Paper is No Longer Available Online: Please contact the author(s).
  
KEY TO SYMBOLS Teaching-oriented Teaching-oriented   Practice-oriented Practice-oriented   International-oriented International-oriented   Theme-oriented Theme-oriented   Research-oriented Research-oriented   Teaching-oriented Diversity-oriented
Selected as a Best Paper Selected as a Best Paper