The year 2020 brought upon many challenges to individuals. One including the need for many to work remotely from their homes. For many people this was a huge change in their lifestyle, the inability to step outside the house without fearing of catching the coronavirus was a huge and an ongoing challenge present in many countries.
In recent decades , the prevalence of work from home arrangements in firms has increased due to continuous advances in information and communication technologies (Shamir and Salomon 1985; Baruch 2000). About 20 percent of German companies gave their workers the option to work from home at least a few days a month in 2009 (Flüter-Hoffmann 2012). There are two major facets of working from home arrangements. Next, workers are working outside their traditional place of employment, usually at home. Second, to share details, there must be a link between the home office and the firm’s website. Employees can communicate with colleagues and clients through the use of information – communication technology (Bélanger 1999). Working from home is therefore not applicable to a number of jobs, and is ideally suited for workers who perform knowledge-based activities primarily and have few face-to – face interactions. Working from home increases the flexibility of the workers in arranging and coordinating their jobs (Bailey and Kurland 2002). In addition , companies can recruit and maintain highly qualified and hard-working workers by providing agreeable working conditions (DuBrin 1991).
But from a theoretical point of view, the effect of working from home on the work effort of workers is unclear. The right to operate from home usually increases the autonomy of workers but, in exchange, reduces the possibilities for businesses to control their workers. This scenario describes a traditional main-agent problem where workers are motivated to misuse their authority by the their individual work effort, leading to shirking actions (Gariety and Shaffer 2007). An opposite inference can be drawn by well-established theories of motivation, such as the model of work characteristics (Hackman and Oldham 1976) or the theory of self-determination (Deci and Ryan 1985).
Empirical data is still sparse about how work from home arrangements affects the work effort of employees. Some studies use survey data to examine the connection between work from home and productivity of employees (Bailyn 1988; Olson 1989; DuBrin 1991; Bélanger 1999). All these noted studies would have a positive impact on the productivity of the employees. However, they use subjective metrics (Bailyn 1988; Olson 1989; Bélanger 1999) that assess perceived increases in efficiency for workers, or they use limited data sets that involve only one business in a particular industry (DuBrin 1991). Other studies explore the impact of working at home on the output of workers with data from series of laboratory experiments to evaluate causal effects (Dutcher 2012; Bloom et al. 2015). Such studies show that work from home has a major positive impact on the productivity of employees. The experimental findings, however, refer to a small subgroup of people, and are not entirely transferable to the entire employee population. In addition, the motivational influence of working from home on the work behavior of workers is implicitly presumed, and no studies include a measure of intrinsic motivation in the empirical study.
The theory of self-determination, introduced by Deci and Ryan ( 1985), analyzes the relation between personality, work environment and work motivation and is based on an argument that is very close to that of the concept of job characteristics. A key point in this theory is the distinction between quantity, guided motivation and self-motivation (Deci and Ryan 1985). A more general concept of autonomous motivation includes intrinsic motivation as the most advanced type of autonomous motivation. In scientific literature the term intrinsic motivation is more prevalent than autonomous motivation. Therefore we use the word intrinsic motivation to describe the following. A major aim of corporate personnel policy is to achieve and encourage intrinsic motivation, because high intrinsic motivation leads to increasing the work effort of the employees. By applying human resource management strategies that meet the needs of workers for flexibility, competence, and relatedness (Ryan and Deci 2000), organizations can attain high intrinsic motivation.Working from home improves management of the workplace by an employee and the coordination of individual job tasks. Working from home , for example, encourages workers to work at their most productive hours, including at night or on weekends. In comparison, workers need to adapt to general working hours and normal breaks while remaining in the working, although this is not their preferred schedule of their working time (Bailyn 1988). Similarly, working from home enables employees to determine if interacting with peers at the workplace is important or if a contact with colleagues is disruptive. Working from home thus offers the ability to work in a relaxed environment at home if an employee wants this tranquility to complete a particular job (Bloom et al. 2015). Working from home thus leads directly to fulfilling the need for autonomy of the employees.
One essential feature of the theory of self-determination is the fact that depending on the job assignment, workers vary in their degree of intrinsic motivation (Ryan and Deci 2000). This implies that employees with a higher level of intrinsic motivation respond to human resource management practices aimed at enhancing the autonomy of employees by providing greater work effort than employees with a lower initial level of intrinsic motivation. Therefore, practices of human resource management which enhance autonomy and intrinsic motivation are complementary in the exercise of work effort. This means that if workers already have a degree of intrinsic incentive, giving employees the ability to work from home is more successful when applied to working from home. It is therefore believed that intrinsic motivation is a moderator of work from home.
Besides causing a higher work commitment, employees will benefit from carrying out work from home because they can save administrative expenses due to reduced office space (Bloom et al . 2015). They should also be mindful of the difficulties and future problems. Next, it would be volunteer work from home.Employees have different preferences, and compulsory homework could lead to frustration (Bélanger 1999). Employers should then give their workers to work from home but let them decide whether they want to work from home or want to stay at the workplace. Second, a possible downside to working from home is that it can trigger personal and professional alienation as it has decreased social contact among employees (Hill et al . 2003). This is why businesses need to change their corporate culture to operate from home. Employees need to have frequent, face-to – face team meetings with managers and colleagues to exchange relevant details, feel integrated into the team and connect with the organization (Bailyn 1988). Third, workers have the highest degree of intrinsic motivation if they are not only responsible for their jobs and can decide freely how to arrange their job tasks but also get daily input on their success (Hackman and Oldham 1976). Therefore, companies need to ensure that their workers receive timely input.