Achieving Effective Remote Working During the COVID‐19 Pandemic: A Work Design Perspective

By Bin Wang, Yukun Liu, Jing Qian, Sharon K. Parker. Applied psychology = Psychologie appliquee, 2020

1,325 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Existing knowledge on remote working can be questioned in an extraordinary pandemic context. We conducted a mixed‐methods investigation to explore the challenges experienced by remote workers at this time, as well as what virtual work characteristics and individual differences affect these challenges. In Study 1, from semi‐structured interviews with Chinese employees working from home in the early days of the pandemic, we identified four key remote work challenges (work‐home interference, ineffective communication, procrastination, and loneliness), as well as four virtual work characteristics that affected the experience of these challenges (social support, job autonomy, monitoring, and workload) and one key individual difference factor (workers’ self‐discipline). In Study 2, using survey data from 522 employees working at home during the pandemic, we found that virtual work characteristics linked to worker's performance and well‐being via the experienced challenges. Specifically, social support was positively correlated with lower levels of all remote working challenges; job autonomy negatively related to loneliness; workload and monitoring both linked to higher work‐home interference; and workload additionally linked to lower procrastination. Self‐discipline was a significant moderator of several of these relationships. We discuss the implications of our research for the pandemic and beyond.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e04dbf7abcbc997f1b1ed639cd0803b0a7c29e57

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In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Social Psychology

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Work From Home During the COVID-19 Outbreak (2021, methodology): “Sociodemographic variables, such as age, sex, caring responsibility, and remote work experience were considered as control variables, as literature recognizes them as possible confounders in the relationships under study.(5,8,48) Specifically, sex (0 1⁄4 M; 1 1⁄4 F), caring responsibility (01⁄4 not ”
Social Isolation and Stress as Predictors of Productivity Perception and Remote Work Satisfaction during the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Role of Concern about the Virus in a Moderated Double Mediation (2020, background): “Considering that the social isolation experienced by workers during lockdown represents the extreme point [14] of a characteristic that is usually present in remote work, this study focuses on the role of social isolation in remote work.”
COVID-19 and digitalization: The great acceleration (2021, background): “Remote working denotes performing the activities of the employing organization from outside the office at a remote virtual location (Wang et al., 2021).”