Proactive Work Design in Unstructured Work: New Challenges and Opportunities

The COVID-19 pandemic causes unprecedented rapid and radical changes to how, where, when, and with whom people work. Such job transformations challenge employees in finding their best work-home balance, cope with insecurity and equip themselves for remote collaboration. This extraordinary situation confronts organizations and employees directly with the impact of work design on people’s life experiences. With blurred physical and relational job features and boundaries, people have to find their own ways to navigate the new assets of work while striving to understand their redefined work- and life identity. These drastic changes risk creating new psychological distress phenomena and call for an understanding of how employees reinvent their new work conditions through proactive strategies (e.g., job crafting, strength use, playful work design) to make it engaging, meaningful, and sustainable. Research is needed that places different forms of proactivity at work in the current context of remote and hybrid working to offer insights on how to promote engaging and sustainable work experiences.

 

Remote working profoundly redefines the boundaries of the social context of work. With work being inextricably intertwined with interpersonal interactions, research is needed on the strategies people initiate to reshape work processes that relied on social cues and interactions. What individual approaches unfold to overcome the lack of informal socialization opportunities common at the workplace and key to unleashing creative potential? How do individuals manage the endless landscape of autonomy and set boundaries of physical, behavioral, and communicative strategies when working remotely? How people try to enhance their job impact and contact with the beneficiaries of their work in the era of remote working? In what ways do employees communicate their best selves and strengths when social interactions in shared workplaces are limited? But also, how people enact their agency when additional demands from different domains (e.g., homeschooling) create boundaries that would not exist in the workplace? How can proactive work behaviors and cognitive crafting help in dealing with such additional non-work demands?

 

Likely, a deeper understanding is warranted for the proactive strategies to manage the demands and resources of hybrid work. How do the shifts between working from home and the workplace impact one’s energy, work purpose, and meaning? Now more than ever broad socio-political, cultural, and legal forces heavily shape work design. How does the broader context of work influence individual proactivity? With scattered workspaces, how do people recompose their tasks and proactively strive for a sense of permanence and belonging to an organization or a job?

Research questions could focus on, but are not limited to:

·       Between- and within-person dynamics

·       New antecedents and outcomes

·       Person-environment interactions

·       Proactive processes

·       Cultural and/or gender differences

·       Methodologies

We particularly encourage longitudinal quantitative and qualitative studies that can provide insights into proactive reinventing strategies for remote and hybrid work, as well as innovative theorizing. 

We would like to acknowledge that Piet Van Gool has acted as coordinator and has contributed to the preparation of the proposal for this Research Topic.