Working from home during the COVID-19 crisis: How self-control strategies elucidate employees' job performance.

Abstract

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.