Abstract
Telecommuting is a flexible form of work that has progressively spread over the last 40 years and which has been strongly encouraged by the measures to limit the COVID-19 pandemic. There is still limited evidence on the effects it has on workers’ health. In this survey we invited 905 workers of companies that made a limited use of telecommuting to fill out a questionnaire to evaluate intrusive leadership of managers (IL), the request for work outside traditional hours (OFF-TAJD), workaholism (Bergen Work Addiction Scale (BWAS)), effort/reward imbalance (ERI), happiness, and common mental issues (CMIs), anxiety and depression, assessed by the Goldberg scale (GADS). The interaction between these variables has been studied by structural equation modeling (SEM). Intrusive leadership and working after hours were significantly associated with occupational stress. Workaholism is a relevant moderator of this interaction: intrusive leadership significantly increased the stress of workaholic workers. Intrusive leadership and overtime work were associated with reduced happiness, anxiety, and depression. These results indicate the need to guarantee the right to disconnect to limit the effect of the OFF-TAJD. In addition to this, companies should implement policies to prevent intrusive leadership and workaholism.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has prompted governments of several countries worldwide to encourage a type of work known as “telecommuting”
905 workers of companies that made a limited use of telecommuting to fill out a questionnaire to evaluate intrusive leadership of managers (IL), the request for work outside traditional hours (OFF-TAJD), workaholism (Bergen Work Addiction Scale (BWAS)), effort/reward imbalance (ERI), happiness, and common mental issues (CMIs), anxiety and depression, assessed by the Goldberg scale (GADS)
Following Little et al [23], we combined the items into three parcels, i.e., aggregate-level indicators comprising the sum of two or more items. This practice is advised against when the focus of the analysis is to investigate the exact relations among the individual items comprising the measured variables, it is instead recommended when the focus is principally on the relations among latent variables, and item indicators are merely tools that allow one to build a measurement model for a latent construct [23], as it was the case for the structural equation modeling (SEM) described in the manuscript
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, has prompted governments of several countries worldwide to encourage a type of work known as “telecommuting”. In Italy, telecommuting is often called “agile” or “smart working”, terms that refer to a much broader landscape than telecommuting. This synecdoche is used to mean this new way of organizing work, and it is commonly adopted by Italian companies and mass media. Besides the well-known advantages of this type of work (e.g., the possibility of employing disabled workers), telecommuting currently has the added function of limiting the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic while simultaneously maintaining an acceptable level of economic activity. Mathematical models have shown that changing the work style of 55% of the working population to telecommuting would be an effective way
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