Adapting to Work-From-Home: Examining the Benefits and Costs of Psychological Detachment from Home

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic forced organizations to shift to remote working to mitigate the spread of the disease. From the employees’ perspective, working from home comes with its own set of challenges. Because the boundary between work and home gets even more blurred as employees work from home, staying focused on their job while being at home takes a great amount of effort and results in higher levels of anxiety and fatigue. Can psychological detachment from home help employees in adapting to work-from-home arrangements? Focusing on this question, we integrate boundary theory and self-regulation theory to examine how and when psychological detachment from home influences daily work engagement and enacted incivility. We conducted an experience sampling study across two work weeks with employees working from home in India during the reopening phase after the nationwide lockdown. Our findings indicate that detachment from home is negatively related with next-morning work-related anxiety, which further impacts state work engagement and enacted incivility. Results also show that detachment from home is positively related with next-morning exhaustion, which in turn predicts state engagement and enacted incivility. Further, the indirect effects of detachment from home on daily engagement and enacted incivility via exhaustion were significant only for employees with low trait self-control. Overall, our study yields theoretical and practical implications for work-from-home practices even after the COVID-19 crisis ends.