Effects of Working from Home on Job Performance: Empirical Evidence in the Saudi Context during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Jamel Choukir,Elsayed Mohamed,Essam Khalil,Munirah Sarhan Alqahtani

doi:10.3390/su14063216

Abstract

This research investigated the mediating role of attitudes and perceptions between working from home (WFH) and employees’ job performance. It also explored the role of gender, education level, and job position in the relationship between specifications and facilities when working from home, as well as attitudes and perceptions. This study is exploratory and capitalizes on novel findings from a questionnaire. Data were collected from 399 employees employed by the principal Saudi businesses. The current study uses structural equation modeling to test the research hypotheses and examines the direct and indirect relationship between working from home and employees’ job performance. The results confirmed the significant direct linkage between WFH and employees’ job performance through the mediating roles of WFH employees’ attitudes and perceptions. Our findings also confirm the significant relationship between WFH employees’ attributes and their job performance, and the significant association between WFH and job performance. However, our results identified the fact that perceptions have an inverse impact on job performance. This study also provides significant theoretical and practical insights for managers who are adopting WFH. It contributes empirically to the literature by informing managers of the factors driving job performance in WFH, helping organizations to cope with the many issues related to a workforce who are working from home. Our research findings also ascertained that WFH seems likely to become a permanent managerial practice in terms of human resources, rather than a simple circumstantial measure. Moreover, this study can be considered as one of the first studies that assess the effect of WFH on employees’ job performance via a mediation role of employee attributes, in the context of Saudi firms.

Highlights

Working from home (WFH) has received growing attention from many scholars over recent years [1,2]
This study investigates the roles of gender, education level, working from home (WFH) experience, position, department, and sector as control variables in measuring the effect of WFH dimensions on job performance (JPRF) from the point of view of employees’ attributes
Most of the previous studies on the attitudes toward WFH were conducted before the pandemic [8,12], while this study has investigated the impact of attitudes toward WFH

Summary

Introduction

Working from home (WFH) has received growing attention from many scholars over recent years [1,2]. WFH, from the perspective of identifying those jobs that can be performed remotely [3–7]. In [8], the authors explained that the working from home concept is known as teleworking. The concept of teleworking is used in its current context to indicate working remotely, away from the office. Teleworking is conducted from home, it is sometimes called “homeworking” [9]. Telework reemerged over recent years as “a new management practice”, a “policy”, an “arrangement” or a “forced” issue [10,11]. It is not a new phenomenon that has been enabled by IT development [12,13]. There is no globally admitted definition of telework.

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Findings

Conclusion