Biophilia in the home-workplace: Integrating dog caregiving and outdoor access to explain teleworkers' daily physical activity, loneliness, and job performance.

We examined whether dog caregiving and outdoor access affect the relationships between a teleworking day and teleworkers' daily physical activity, loneliness, and job performance during the pandemic in two different seasons in 2021. Building on the biophilia hypothesis, we hypothesized that dog caregiving and outdoor access would attenuate the adverse effects of telework on our outcomes. We tested our cross-level moderation hypotheses in a Belgian daily diary data set combining two data collections during 10 workdays in two seasons: One in 284 teleworking employees in spring and one in 151 teleworking employees in autumn-of whom 75 also participated in spring (Npersons = 360, Ndatapoints = 3,809). Consistent with our hypotheses, mixed coefficient modeling showed two-way interactions between teleworking day and dog caregiving, and between teleworking day and outdoor access on daily physical activity, daily loneliness, and daily job performance. Specifically, both dog caregiving and outdoor access buffered against the harmful effects of a teleworking day on these three outcomes: On teleworking days compared to nonteleworking days, there was a smaller decrease in physical activity and in job performance for employees who had a dog or who had outdoor access compared to employees who did not. Likewise, dog caregiving and outdoor access buffered against an increase in loneliness on teleworking days, with a less steep increase for employees with a dog or outdoor access. Our study shows the importance of contextualizing the home context more broadly by including dogs and outdoor access at home when considering the effects of telework during and after the pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The Use of Work-Home Practices and Work-Home Conflict: Examining the Role of Volition and Perceived Pressure in a Multi-Method Study.

In response to the rising number of individuals who have to combine work and home responsibilities, organizations increasingly offer work-home practices. These are HR-practices such as telework and part-time work that can help employees to combine work and home roles. However, extant research on the relationship between work-home practice use and both work-to-home conflict (i.e., work interfering with private life) and home-to-work conflict (i.e., private life interfering with work) shows inconsistent results. In this study, we posit that employees' work-home conflict does not so much depend on whether or not they use a specific work-home practice, but rather on (1) the degree to which their (non-)use of this practice is in line with their preference (i.e., volition) and (2) the pressure they experience from the work and/or the home environment to act in another way than they prefer (i.e., perceived work pressure and perceived home pressure). Hypotheses are tested for two specific work-home practices (i.e., home-based telework and part-time work) in both a field study and an experimental between-subject vignette study. Results show that work-home conflict is affected by volition, perceived work pressure and perceived home pressure; yet, some differences were found between the two types of work-home conflict (i.e., work-to-home and home-to-work 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 similar predictors of work-home conflict among both the group of users and the group of non-users. These findings may encourage researchers to examine characteristics of employees' work-home practice use (e.g., volition, perceived pressure) in addition to the mere use of these practices when studying their effectiveness.

Use of family-friendly work arrangements and work-family conflict: Crossover effects in dual-earner couples.

This study uses a dyadic approach to examine how an employee's work-family conflict is affected when his or her partner makes use of family-friendly work arrangements. We focused on 2 types of family-friendly practices, that is, reduced work hours and schedule or workplace flexibility. Hypotheses were tested with multilevel structural equation modeling using information of 186 dual-earner couples. In line with our hypotheses, we found support for both a positive and a negative crossover effect, though the results showed differences between the 2 types of family-friendly work arrangements. First, a positive crossover effect was found for both reduced work hours and schedule or workplace flexibility; however, the specific mechanisms explaining this effect differed per type of arrangements. In particular, employees whose partner made use of reduced work hours were found to experience less home demands, which was in turn associated with lower family-to-work conflict, whereas employees whose partner made use of schedule or workplace flexibility experienced a similar positive crossover effect but through an increase in the social support they perceived. Second, a negative crossover effect was found only for reduced work hours and not for schedule or workplace flexibility. Specifically, employees whose partner made use of reduced work hours were found to work on average more hours a week, which was in turn related with more work-to-family conflict, whereas employees whose partner made use of schedule or workplace flexibility worked on average fewer hours a week and consequently experienced lower work-to-family conflict. Implications for literature and practice are discussed.