Navigating the New Normal: Psychological Capital's Mediating Role in the Work-From-Home Paradigm

Abstract

Working from home (WFH) has become the expected trend as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic. The impact of family conflict, social isolation, distracting environment, job autonomy, and self-leadership on employees' productivity, work engagement, and stress levels have been examined in this study with a mediating role of Psychological capital. There has been little study on the impact of Psychological capital as a mediator and its influence on remote work productivity, work engagement, and stress. The data was collected from employees of IT sector organizations. Through online and print surveys, a sample of 429 respondents was gathered using the convenience sampling method. The dependent variables were workers’ productivity, work engagement, and Stress, the mediating variable was Psychological Capital and the independent variables were family-work conflict, social isolation, distracting environment, job autonomy, and self-leadership under the framework of the Job Demand and Resource model. The PLS-SEM tool was used to investigate the association between research variables. The SPSS tool was used to run the descriptive statistics of respondents. Through this study, it was able to conclude that Job Demand and Job Resources significantly impact productivity, work engagement, and stress through psychological capital. Job Demand negatively impacts productivity, and work engagement and positively impacts stress while Job Resource positively impacts productivity, and work engagement and negatively impact stress.