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Nieuwe werkvormen: Een hulp voor werknemers? Het begrijpen van inconsistenties in the relatie tussen werk-privé paktijken en uitkomsten bij werknemers thuis en op het werk

Organizations today increasingly offer work-home practices to their employees. Work-home practices are HR initiatives that provide employees with additional resources (e.g., flexibility, time) that can facilitate balancing work with other life roles and may therefore help to lower employees’ work-home conflict, that is, the conflict that occurs when employees’ participation in their work role interferes with their participation in their home roles and activities. It is argued that offering work-home practices may help organizations to attract the best-qualified employees and to maintain a healthy and productive workforce. For instance, since using work-home practices may facilitate employees’ work-home combination, it may lower employees’ stress and enhance their job satisfaction, engagement, performance, commitment and retention. However, extant research on these effects is vastly inconclusive, finding sometimes positive effects, sometimes no effects and sometimes even harmful effects. As work-home practices are becoming more current in today’s “new world of work”, it is important for researchers and practitioners to explain the observed inconsistencies and to understand the beneficial and/or harmful effects of using these practices. The main aim of this dissertation is therefore to improve our understanding of the impact of work-home practice use and get insight into the conditions under which work-home practices improve or, conversely, harm employee outcomes. We do this in three empirical studies, in each of which we focus on one or more specific work-home practices.

In a first study, we focus on the impact of two work-home practices (i.e., part-time work and home-based telework) on work-to-home and home-to-work conflict and take into account characteristics of the use/non-use of these practices. In particular, we posit that there are similar sources of variance within both the group of users and the group of non-users that are more important for understanding work-to-home conflict and home-to-work conflict than the mere use of these practices. We focus on two dimensions, specifically (1) the degree to which employees’ use or non-use is in line with their preference and, hence, is volitional; and (2) the perceived external pressure to either use or not use a specific work-home practice. We combine a classical field survey in 381 staff members of a Belgian university with an experimental vignette survey in 556 employees to study the relevance of these two dimensions when explaining employees’ work-home conflict. Hypotheses are tested using hierarchical regressions. Results support the relevance of volition, perceived work pressure and perceived home pressure for understanding work-home conflict; yet, some differences were found between the two types of conflict and between the two types of work-home practices. Our results nuance the dichotomy between users and non-users of work-home practices that has been dominantly used in the work-home practice literature to date and point to relevant differences within both the group of users and the group of non-users. These findings may encourage researchers to focus on cognitive aspects rather than on the mere use of work-home practices when studying their effectiveness.

In a second study, we examine the daily impact of using home-based telework on work-to-home and home-to-work conflict. We argue that whether teleworkers work from home on a given day or not will affect their work-home boundary role transitions that day (e.g., doing home tasks while working; finishing work tasks after hours), which will in turn affect their conflict between work and home. In addition, we argue that the latter impact may not be equally strong for everybody, but depends on individuals’ preferences to protect their home(/work) domain from work(/home) interruptions. Hence, we study how a teleworking day affects daily work-to-home conflict and daily home-to-work conflict. In doing this, we consider both the use of telework and work-home conflict as daily fluctuating experiences. We capture these dynamic processes at the work-home interface among both users and non-users of home-based telework and include both work-to-home transitions (i.e., interruptions of work activities to deal with home demands during work hours) and home-to-work transitions (i.e., interruptions of home activities to deal with work demands after hours) as mediators. Hypotheses are tested through multilevel moderated mediation modeling using diary data collected during 14 consecutive workdays with 81 employees (N = 678 data points). Employees were found to make more work-to-home transitions  on teleworking days, which was related to lower work-to-home conflict but higher home-to-work conflict on these days. They also made more home-to-work transitions on teleworking days, which was related to more work-to-home conflict on these days. The latter effect was stronger for employees with a home protection preference. There was no moderating impact of work protection preference. Overall, employees experienced less work-to-home conflict but more home-to-work conflict on teleworking days compared to non-teleworking days. Our study supports the use of a daily diary approach to understand the relationship between telework and work-home conflict.

In a third study, we evaluate a pilot initiative on telework in a Belgian company using a quasi-experimental design to study the causal effects of home-based telework on employees’ person-level and day-level stress, work-to-home conflict, work engagement and job performance. Employees in the intervention group (N = 39) were allowed to work from home on at most two days a week during a period of three months, whereas employees in the control group (N = 39) were not. We combine a pretest-posttest design—to assess changes in person-level outcomes over time—and a daily diary design—to examine day-level effects of having worked at home on a given day. Pretest-posttest data are collected during a pretest survey before telework was introduced (T1) and a posttest survey at the end of the three-month pilot period (T2) and are analyzed through paired samples t-tests and analysis of variance. Day-level data are collected in 13 daily assessments during consecutive workdays one month after the onset of the pilot and are analyzed through mixed coefficient modeling. Pretest-posttest analysis showed that employees in the teleworking group had less stress and less work-to-home conflict at T2 compared to T1, but no differences in work engagement or job performance were found over time. In the control group, there were no pretest-posttest differences in any of these outcomes. Daily analyses showed that teleworkers reported lower stress, similar work-to-home conflict, higher work engagement and higher job performance on teleworking days compared to non-teleworking days. There were no differences between teleworkers and non-teleworkers on these outcomes on non-teleworking days. Our results provide support for both general and daily effects of telework, but the effects were dependent upon the level of analysis.

Datum:1 okt 2014 →  20 jun 2019
Trefwoorden:Work-Life Balance, Work-Life Practices
Disciplines:Toegepaste economie, Economische geschiedenis, Macro-economie en monetaire economie, Micro-economie, Toerisme, Management
Project type:PhD project