Take your time off to recover when working from home. The mediation of mastery between job resources, performance and insomnia at Covid-19 time

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many workers have been forced to work from home, a situation referred to in the literature as mandatory work-from-home. Governments also imposed lockdowns that prohibited people from leaving their homes. In this situation, the boundaries between work and private life have become blurred and finding time to recover from work has become even more difficult than in traditional times. As a result, levels of psycho-physical symptoms and sleep disturbances increased, while results on the impact on job performance were contradictory. Among the psychological experiences that could underlie the recovery process, mastery played a crucial role, since people sought new stimuli and challenging situations that could result in some kind of success or achievement. In this study, we aimed to investigate two job resources that are particularly relevant during WFH, namely job autonomy and supervisor support, as antecedents of mastery. In addition, we examined the effect of mastery on both self-evaluated job performance and insomnia problems. The study was conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy and had a three-wave design. A convenience sample of 130 employees (67% female) from different working sectors completed an online questionnaire. SPSS 27 and Mplus 8 were used to conduct the analyses. The structural equation model showed a good fit to the data [χ2(88) = 101.16, p = 0.159, RMSEA = 0.03, CFI = 0.99, TLI = 0.98, SRMR = 0.04]. According to the results, both job autonomy and supervisor support at T1 predicted mastery at T2, which in turn significantly increased performance at T3 and decreased insomnia at T3. A bootstrap analysis confirmed the significance of the indirect effects and thus the mediation of mastery. The model included gender, living with children and remote working days per week as control variables. Among the main limitations of the study, the self-reported nature of data should be mentioned, which increased the likelihood of common method variance effects. Other-reported or objective data (especially for the evaluation of job performance) would be useful to overcome this limitation. However, given that the design was longitudinal, this should have reduced the risk. As further limitation, the study used a small and heterogeneous sample of workers. Results confirmed that mastery experiences have played a crucial role during Covid-19 mandatory work-from-home, which points to some potential implications in case of implementing telework beyond the emergency. First of all, awareness of the impact of recovery and mastery experiences should be promoted among workers. Through information and training processes, individuals may become more able to take time off and use it in the right way to recover from work. This study also highlighted the role of supervisors; they play a strategic role in the implementation of remote working and should be supported to understand how to manage new ways of working and move to a "managing by results" approach that allows their team more autonomy. Given the impact of the pandemic on well-being and insomnia, organizations should provide assistance programs and opportunities for counselling for all employees.