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The global pandemic caused by Coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) severely disrupted peoples professional and personal lives making many employees required to work from home. Our study examines family-supportive supervisory behaviors (FSSB) impact on in-role behaviors through satisfaction with work-life balance and psychological availability at work to gain insight into the effects of the pandemic on work and home domains. Based on three waves of data and a sample of 179 full-time employees (32+ hours per week) forced to work 100% at home because of the pandemic, the findings suggest satisfaction with work-life balance and psychological availability at work serially mediated the relationship between FSSBs and in-role behaviors. Also, satisfaction with work-life balance mediated the relationship between FSSB and psychological availability at work, and psychological availability at work mediated the relationship between satisfaction with work-life balance and in-role behaviors. Practical and theoretical implications, along with future research, are discussed.
The Coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused abrupt changes in many workers work and life domains because they were forced to work from home immediately. Initially, governmental officials worldwide implemented mandated confinement and lockdowns, business and educational institutional closings, and social distancing to minimize the possibility of transmitting COVID-19 (Anderson et al., 2020). These measures caused employees professional and personal lives to appear more blurred and non-distinctive (Fisher et al., 2020) and, therefore, increased the challenges of work-life balance (Allen et al., 2021; Andrade & Fernandes, 2021; Carnevale & Hatak, 2020). Further, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these mandatory precautions have impacted employees mental well-being (Ivbijaro et al., 2020; Kola et al., 2021; Panda et al., 2021), possibly reducing the chances of employees being psychologically available for work.
Since the initial inception of the global pandemic, many lessons have been learned. The COVID-19 pandemic has caused workers to burn out and experience increased work-family and family-work conflicts (Sharma et al., 2022). The COVID pandemic has demonstrated that the claim of individuals ideally perceiving work and life domains as separate entities is a facade, and society s beliefs need to be updated (Kossek et al., 2021). Kossek and Lee (2020) propose that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light inequalities in work-life employment policies, which should be modified based on principles of balanced flexibility. Scholars...