Philippine E-Journals

GRIT DOES NOT MODERATE THE RELATIONS BETWEEN WORK FAMILY CONFLICT AND WORK ENGAGEMENT AMONG WORK-FROM-HOME EMPLOYEES DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Alethea Patricia Del Castillo-Arenillo

 

Abstract:

This study aimed to examine an apparent concern in telecommuting which is work-family conflict and how could it affect employees’ work engagement. In addition, this study also investigated the buffering role of grit in the impact of work-family conflict on work engagement among work from home employees during the pandemic. There was a total of 159 respondents who are working from home for the last 6 months due to the quarantine restrictions in the country. Respondents are mostly female (77.36%), single in status (77.36%), and hold a regular/tenured employment status (72.33%). The average age of the respondents is 28.68 years old (SD = 6). In terms of hours spent working from home, there is not much difference between those who work for mostly 8 hours and more than 8 hours a day. The t-test results indicated that those who spend more than 8 hours telecommuting reported higher work-to-family interference than those who spend less than 8 hours working from home (t(157) = -3.231, p-value = 0.001) while the data for family to-work interference are comparable between the two groups (t(157) = 0.501, p-value = 0.617). Moreover, results showed that there are no significant correlations between work-to-family and family-to-work interferences to work engagement with a p-value of 0.511 and 0.684 respectively. Similarly, grit did not appear to be a significant moderator when a multiple linear regression model with interaction terms that used work engagement as a dependent variable was fitted to the data.