PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

The Covid-19 pandemic caught organizations all over the world totally unprepared and forced most of them to transition into a virtual workplace, whereby employees were confronted with limited social contact. Accordingly, keeping employees engaged is key to ensure business continuity. Studies on virtual work engagement offer substantive insights into how to keep employees engaged in remote work settings. However, we still lack insights into how employees experience work engagement in times of crises. To generate empirical insights into virtual work engagement during the Covid-19 pandemic, we conducted a qualitative study with 1256 ratings of employees who worked from home from March to August 2020. In particular, we draw on the job demands-job resource theory to explore how employees experience their access to supervisory-, collegial-, and organizational resources during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate five types of virtual work engagement differing in the degree to which they have access to crucial job resources, namely supervisory support, collegial interaction and organizational working conditions. We discuss these five types and develop implications for designing resourceful work environments to enforce employees' virtual work engagement in times of crises.