The Impact of Enforced Working from Home on Employee Job Satisfaction during COVID-19: An Event System Perspective

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, working from home (WFH) became the only option for many organizations, generating increasing interest in how such arrangements impact employee job satisfaction. Adopting an event system perspective, this study employed an online survey to capture the WFH experiences of 256 workers from 66 Chinese enterprises during the pandemic. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), the study examined how satisfaction was affected by five job characteristics when working from home: longevity (time), home workspace suitability (space), job autonomy (criticality), digital social support (novelty) and monitoring mechanisms (disruption). The findings reveal that three configurations promote employee job satisfaction and that a suitable home workspace is a core condition. In the absence of a suitable workspace, digital social support and an appropriate monitoring mechanism, long-term WFH was found to undermine job satisfaction. However, job autonomy is not a necessary condition for employee job satisfaction. These findings have clear implications for theory and practice.