psychological factors for eworkers
A database alert prompted me to an article by Grant, Wallace and Spurgeon (2013), ‘An exploration of the psychological factors affecting remote e-worker’s job effectiveness, well-being and work-life balance’, which was published on Employee Relations, vol. 35, no. 5, pp. 527-546. The article attracted me because its title contained “psychological factors” and “work-life balance” which I expected would give some indications for my thesis and also that it was an exploratory qualitative study using thematic analysis.
After reading the article, I was a little disappointed about its limited elaboration on “psychological factors” in the “Results” part. The article summarised 10 themes arising from the data analysis, but only “trust” I feel it is directly related to psychology. It could become more integrated with its title and abstract if the authors either clearly indicate which themes can be labelled as psychological factors or explain whether they consider all these ten themes belong to psychological factors – as some are clearly not, such as “e-working practices”. I could feel a disconnection between the earlier parts of the article and its findings, which might be a matter of effective reporting other than a structural issue.
The “Introduction” part is very well written. One particular feature is that the authors effectively defined “e-working” by indicating it was about “moving work to the workers instead of moving workers to the work” (p. 529), contrary to the traditional meaning of office working and by giving a comparison to “teleworking” that e-working focused on the “location independent aspect” while teleworking more on “travel substitute aspect” (p. 529). In addition, the authors discussed some representative psychological aspects which were commonly related to e-working in terms of trust, psychological contract, stress, social isolation, restorative effects, and well-being.
The methodology part is inspirational for my own research. The interview questions are designed to be suitable for three types of interviews, face-to-face, email or telephone. In addition the authors mentioned using “Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic approach” for data coding (p. 535), which I need to check upon and see whether is applicable for my future data analysis.
Work-life balance 