Does working from home on a given day complicate or rather facilitate combining work and home roles that day, why and for whom? To answer these questions, we examined how a teleworking day affects daily work-to-home conflict and daily home-to-work conflict. Based on boundary theory, we expected these relationships to be mediated by daily role transitions and moderated by employees’ preferences to protect their home(/work) domain from work(/home) interruptions. Hypotheses were tested through multilevel moderated mediation modeling using diary data collected during 14 consecutive workdays with 81 employees ( N = 678 data points). In line with our expectations, employees were found to make more work-to-home transitions (i.e. interruptions of work activities to deal with home demands during work hours) on teleworking days, which was related to lower work-to-home conflict but higher home-to-work conflict on these days. They also made more home-to-work transitions (i.e. interruptions of home activities to deal with work demands after hours) on teleworking days, which was related to more work-to-home conflict on these days. The latter effect was stronger for employees with a home protection preference. There was no moderating impact of work protection preference. Overall, employees experienced less work-to-home conflict but more home-to-work conflict on teleworking days compared to non-teleworking days.

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This quasi-experimental study examines the impact of telework on employees' stress, work-tohome conflict, work engagement and job performance on a between-person and a within-person level. Data were collected in a Belgian company that had launched a pilot telework initiative.Employees in the intervention group (N = 39) were allowed to work from home on at most two days a week whereas employees in the control group (N = 39) were not. To examine changes in person-level outcomes over time, we collected data before telework was introduced (T1) and at the end of the pilot (T2). To examine day-level effects, we collected daily data on 13 consecutive workdays after the onset of the pilot. Multivariate repeated measures MANOVA showed no significant interaction effect between group and measurement occasion, yet univariate analyses showed that employees in the teleworking group had less stress at T2 compared to T1. No univariate differences in work-to-home conflict, work engagement or job performance were found over time. Daily analyses using linear mixed coefficient modeling showed that teleworkers reported lower stress, lower work-to-home conflict, higher work engagement and higher job performance on teleworking days compared to non-teleworking days.

In response to the rising number of individuals who have to combine work and home responsibilities, organizations increasingly offer work-home practices. These are HR-practices such as telework and part-time work that can help employees to combine work and home roles. However, extant research on the relationship between work-home practice use and both work-to-home conflict (i.e., work interfering with private life) and home-to-work conflict (i.e., private life interfering with work) shows inconsistent results. In this study, we posit that employees’ work-home conflict does not so much depend on whether or not they use a specific work-home practice, but rather on (1) the degree to which their (non-)use of this practice is in line with their preference (i.e., volition) and (2) the pressure they experience from the work and/or the home environment to act in another way than they prefer (i.e., perceived work pressure and perceived home pressure). Hypotheses are tested for two specific work-home practices (i.e., home-based telework and part-time work) in both a field study and an experimental between-subject vignette study. Results show that work-home conflict is affected by volition, perceived work pressure and perceived home pressure; yet, some differences were found between the two types of work-home conflict (i.e., work-to-home and home-to-work conflict) and between the two types of work-home practices. Our results nuance the dichotomy between users and non-users of work-home practices that has been dominantly used in the work-home practice literature to date and point to similar predictors of work-home conflict among both the group of users and the group of non-users. These findings may encourage researchers to examine characteristics of employees’ work-home practice use (e.g., volition, perceived pressure) in addition to the mere use of these practices when studying their effectiveness.

It is generally assumed that dogs show increased attention towards humans. A major part of this includes attention towards visual cues such as bodily gestures. We tested empirically whether dogs are visually attentive towards human body movement. Based on methods from visual perception research in humans, we used point-light figures (PLFs) to investigate whether dogs attend to human body movement compared to other forms of motion. We investigated dogs' attentiveness towards vocalisation-paired PLFs by adopting a preferential looking paradigm. Results indicate that dogs show increased attention towards vocalisation-paired human-shaped PLFs in comparison with inverted and non-inverted scrambled configurations of the samePLFs. This increased attention, however, was only present in the case of PLFs that simulated a human in frontal orientation but not for PLFs in lateral orientation. We conclude that dogs prefer to look at PLFs of socially relevant (i.e. frontally facing) human body (i.e. natural) movement rather than scrambled (i.e. unnatural) displays.Our results indicate that PLFs may function as a promising tool to investigate dogs' visual perceptual preferences and mechanisms.