Examining the Impact of Remote e-Working on Job Performance and Occupational Wellbeing among Academics in Malaysia: Job Demands-Resources Theory Perspectives

Abstract

Social distancing requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of remote e-working (Banerjee, 2020). In practice, remote workers’ mental health and wellbeing has received incremental attention (Price, 2018; Russell, 2019)- particularly among academics (Han et al., 2020; Mohamed et al., 2020). The prevalence of remote e-working practices among academics prior to the pandemic (Aczel et al., 2021), prolonged exposure to remote e-working due to campus closures (Ross, 2021); as well as abruptly remodelled expectations of higher education (El-Azar, 2022) resulted in high demands among academics (Cao et al., 2020). According to De Gruyter (2020), academics have experienced stress, insecurity and pressure as collaborative networks, shift to online teaching and supervision, as well as work-life balance were disrupted. Theoretically, few studies have adopted the job demands-resources theory as a framework to understand and promote occupational wellbeing and performance in remote e- working environments (Bilotta et al., 2021). This indicates that existing models predicting outcomes of telecommuting could have been flawed. Empirical studies have equally produced conflicting outcomes of remote e-working (Grant et al., 2019; Santuzzi & Barber, 2018) . Keywords: Conservation of Resources; Job Demands-Resources; Job Performance; Occupational Wellbeing; Remote e-working