Working from home during the COVID-19 crisis: How self-control strategies elucidate employees’ job performance
Research output: Journal contributions › Journal articles › Research › peer-review
Authors
Employees around the globe experience manifold challenges to maintain job performance during the so-called work-from-home experiment caused by the COVID-19 crisis. Whereas the self-control literature suggests that higher trait self-control should enable employees to deal with these demands more effectively, we know little about the underlying mechanisms. In a mixed-methods approach and two waves of data collection, we examine how self-control strategies elucidate the link between teleworking employees' trait self-control and their job performance. Using a qualitative approach, we explored which strategies employees use to telework effectively ( N = 266). In line with the process model of self-control, reported strategies pertained to situation modification (i.e., altering the physical, somatic, or social conditions) and cognitive change (i.e., goal setting, planning/scheduling, and autonomous motivation). Subsequent preregistered, quantitative analyses with a diverse sample of 106 teleworkers corroborated that higher trait self-control is related to job performance beyond situational demands and prior performance. Among all self-control strategies, modifying somatic conditions and autonomous motivation was significantly associated with job performance and mediated the self-control-performance link. This research provides novel insights into the processes by which employees productively work from home and inspires a broad(er) view on the topic of self-control at work.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Applied Psychology |
| Volume | 71 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Pages (from-to) | 853-880 |
| Number of pages | 28 |
| ISSN | 0269-994X |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 07.2022 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Authors. Applied Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of International Association of Applied Psychology.
- COVID-19, process model, self-control strategies, telework, trait self-control
- Psychology