Towards More Proactive Sustainable Human Resource Management Practices? A Study on Stress Due to the ICT-Mediated Integration of Work and Private Life

Abstract

This article discusses sustainability in Human Resource Management (HRM) in the blurred digital working life, focusing on the emotion of stress. Its empirical basis is an activity and emotion diary study conducted with 26 employees of three industrial companies in Sweden. Our results show that work and private life are integrated by digital activities and also by emotions. Due to the extensive use of digital devices, stress in the working sphere is not only connected with work, and stress in the private sphere is not only connected with private life. The study also shows that stress is often episodic and can end due to activities connected with both the trigger and non-trigger spheres. From a social sustainability perspective, this study suggests that HRM should gently extend employee consideration beyond the traditional temporal and spatial boundaries of work, i.e., also including private life when understanding work in the digital age.

Private ICT-Activities and Emotions at Work – A Swedish Diary Study

“…As suggested by Ashkanasy and Dorris (2017), an activity diary was developed to collect data on ICT-mediated boundary-crossing activities between work and private life and related emotions. In this study, we focus on the non-work activities performed at work and in another study, we focused on the emotion on stress, to discuss sustainability in Human Resource Management (HRM) in the blurred digital working life (Palm et al 2020). Furthermore, the diary has also been analyzed to consider two other dimensions besides emotions: individual strategies for handling the relation between work and home (Bergman et al 2020) and micro-technological strategies for handling the relation between work and home (Rosengren et al, Forthcoming).…”

The Effect of Remote Working on Employees Wellbeing and Work-Life Integration during Pandemic in Egypt

“…Some results revealed the physiological aspects of remote working that are beneficial in reducing blood pressure compared to working in the office (Grant et al, 2013). However, these benefits can be disproved in the inability to psychologically disconnect from work (Palm, Bergman & Rosengren, 2020). The authors added that to recover from psychological detachment, it is crucial to differentiate between being psychologically or physically absent from work.…”

“…Still, during the past few months where organizations decided to operate remotely, the boundaries between work and life became blurred thanks to the technology that enables flexibility in time and place where work can be done (Wepfer, Allen, Brauchli, Jenny & Bauer, 2018). According to Palm et al (2020). many researches explained the relationship between work and life could be explained in term of work-life balance, family-to-work conflict, work-to-family conflict, work spillover, work-to-family interference; other studies stated that technology helped in facilitating the reach of family-related matters into work life, this helped in developing a bridging concept such as work-life integration or boundarylessness.…”

Optimal Allocation of Human Resource Structure Based on Capability Maturity Model Integration

“…In the era of knowledge economy, if enterprises still stick to the mechanical thinking mode and only focus on the local optimization of human resources, it may be difficult to get the expected results. erefore, it is necessary to study an effective optimal allocation method of human resource structure [7].…”