A decade analysis of employees’ well-being and performance while working from home: a bibliometric approach
| Date | 12 March 2024 |
| Pages | 22-42 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/IDD-03-2023-0030 |
| Published date | 12 March 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Library & information services,Lending,Document delivery,Collection building & management,Stock revision,Consortia |
| Author | Ridhima Goel,Jagdeep Singla,Amit Mittal,Meenal Arora |
A decade analysis of employees’well-being and
performance while working from home: a
bibliometric approach
Ridhima Goel and Jagdeep Singla
Institute of Management Studies and Research, Maharshi Dayanand University Rohtak, Rohtak, India, and
Amit Mittal and Meenal Arora
Chitkara Business School, Chitkara University, Rajpura, India
Abstract
Purpose –Work-from-home (WFH) has gained popularity over the past years. This study aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis to systematical ly
review and synthesize scholarly literature on the complex interplay between WFH, employee well-being and performance.
Design/methodology/approach –The study incorporates analysis of the bibliometric including performance analysis, content analysis and
scientific mapping that is applied to 497 Scopus papers. VOSviewer software was used to evaluate the data.
Findings –This study posits an imbalance between the count of documents and the citations earned by each author. International Journal of
Environmental Research and Public Health was regarded as a leading journal with maximum citation s and publications. The highest count of
publications came from most Asian countries such as India, China, Indonesia and Japan. The investigation indicated that the wri ters with the
maximum citations were predominantly the authors of the majorly cited papers. Further, the text mining through co-occurrence of keyword analysis
generated five clusters and cocited references revealed three themes.
Practical implications –The current research might benefit both research groups as well as human resource professionals since it also reveals the
research necessity and gaps in the WFH domain.
Originality/value –This research delves into unexplored facets of WFH beyond traditional studies over the past decade by examining remote work
arrangements in today’s economy, revealing previously unnoticed dynamics affecting employee well-being and performance. This innovativ e
viewpoint enhances the literature and provides an empirical foundation for strategic organizational decision-maki ng and future study.
Keywords Work-from-home, Remote work, Well-being, Performance, Bibliometric analysis, VOSviewer
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
The evolution of technologyhas altered and enhanced our lives
in various ways. In addition to making importantbenefits to the
economy, technology has transformed the way we work
(Donnelly and Johns, 2021). The advancement of technology
has rendered work-from-home (WFH) possible. The concept
of WFH; commonly known as remote work, telecommuting or
telework; is growing widely popular in today’s environment.
Remote work is defined as overall organizational work
that takes place outside of the conventional organizational
limitations of time and space (Nilles, 1988). Working at the
workplace had beena major component of lateindustrial as well
as postindustrial civilizations,making telework a unique option
(Suzman, 2020). Although numerous self-employed workers,
artisans, authors and craftsmen work from their homes and fix
their working hours, mostof themstill work from nine to five on
a daily basis in specific organizationalpremise (Nilles, 1988).
Though working from home has been a matter of issue for
researchers for a prolonged period (Mokhtarian, 2009), it was only
during COVID-19 that businesses, personnel and government
entities began to recognize the advantages of WFH when everyone
wasforcedtostayattheirhomes(Dandotiya and Aggarwal, 2022).
Moreover, telework has introduced new problems to human
resource administration, including the necessity for businesses and
individuals to adapt to telecommuting to achieve higher standards
of performance (Abulibdeh, 2020).
Many suburban employees prefer to WFH, even if their
offices are nearby. Certain findings indicate that part-time
employment among women professionals, middle-aged adults,
full-time employees withchildren, those with longer commutes
and individuals livingat relatively bigger residences have a huge
propensity to choose to WFH on alternate days (Fatmi et al.,
2022). Not only that, teleworking may eliminate daily
commutes and trafficjams, enhance air quality, boost efficiency
and productivity, provide schedule flexibility and promote
work–life balance, including other advantages (Harpaz, 2002).
A study by Bloom et al. (2015) suggested that working from
The current issue and full text archiveof this journal is available on Emerald
Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/2398-6247.htm
Information Discovery and Delivery
53/1 (2025) 22–42
© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 2398-6247]
[DOI 10.1108/IDD-03-2023-0030]
Received 28 March 2023
Revised 20 July 2023
10 October 2023
9 December 2023
Accepted 5 February 2024
22
home has a promising bright future while exploring a highly
significant increase in the performance of the employees, and
believed that the practice of working from home should be
probed even more. As firms and organizations start to resume
their work postpandemic,initiatives and tactics should be taken
to encourage WFH or some other type of telecommuting to
maintain and improve the performance of the employees
(Shamshiripour et al.,2020). Although, in the past 10 years,
numerous experts have explored studies on the wellnessof the
employees, it was only in 2021 and 2022 that the relation
between well-being and performancewhile working from home
has been explored (Cantante-Rodrigues et al.,2021). Previous
studies relating to WFH have enabled a relationship between
employees’productivity and their well-being (Vashishth and
Jhamb, 2021;Lopeset al.,2023).
The concept of WFH and its effecton work effectiveness and
well-being are extensively researchednot only within academic
circles but also in nonacademic domains such as industry
and business. Nonetheless, it was explored by 70% of the
researchers that if they could remotelywork even in the future,
they would perform more effectively and 66% indicated that
doing so might facilitate their well-being (Aczel et al.,2021).
Therefore, it is stated that employees’psychological well-being
affects the performance of the employees working from home
(Sutarto et al., 2021). Contrarily, according to the World
Trend Index (2022), most organizations are opposing remote
work as this transitionhas made it more difficult to have faith in
employees’productivity. However, 73% of employees think
they require a more compelling reason to report to work than
business expectations (WorldTrend Index, 2022). Despite the
ongoing controversies, WFH is promoted as a remedy for the
work–life balance(Ahmad et al.,2022).
Since many studieshave been conducted on work from home
and the various viewpoints of researcherscontradict each other,
it is important to comprehensively synthesize the existing
literature. Hence, the present study conducts a comprehensive
synthesis of emerging research trendswithin the past decade in
the domain of WFH by investigating the chronological rise of
publications, authorcontributions, keyword co-occurrence and
content analysis using bibliometric analysis, hence, providing
insights into future research trends for researchers. The
phenomena of WFH adoption have spurred the study to
analyze a pattern of remote work over a decade (2013–2022,
n¼497), where 18 publications were eliminated from the
publication year of 2023. The bibliometric review mitigated
subjective biases in contrast with conventionalliterature review
techniques such as systematic literature review (Donthu et al.,
2021). Consequently, this approach enhanced the quality,
replicability and transparency of the analysis, making it more
reliable and rigorous. In this endeavor, our current research
seeks to address the followingresearch questions:
RQ1. What are the observed patterns in publications of
remote work from 2013to 2022?
RQ2. How can the characterist ics of research fields, major
sources, frequently cited papers and coauthorship patterns
of authors, institutions and countries articulate in t he
current domain?
RQ3. What are the primary keywords that frequently appear
along with work-from-home in scholarly literature?
What are the anticipated researchtrends in this area?
RQ4. What are the themes analyzed from the cocitation of
cited references?
To address the research questions,we analyze the WFH studies
through bibliometric evaluation and content analysis. The
research is further organized as follows: Section 2 discusses
the background knowledge, encompassing the scientific
literature in the context of WFH, employee well-being and
performance. Section 3 elucidates the methodology used to
conduct the current bibliometric research work. Section 4
delves into a detailed explanation of the data analysis.Section 5
deliberates the findingsof our research. Section 6 delineates the
theoretical and practical contributions of our study and finally,
Section 7 concludes by addressing the future directions and
limitationsof our study.
2. Theoretical background
2.1 Evolution of work-from-home
The concept of WFH has its origins in the 1900s with the
emergence of “telework,”or “telecommuting,”as a revolutionary
way out of normal lives by leveraging technology and shifting
from traditional lifestyles to enable individuals to work from their
residences and workplaces or other locations (Huws et al., 1990).
Thereafter, a study by Mokhtarian (1991) provides a theoretical
framework for telecommuting while discussing the challenges
associated with the emergence of this new work environment
(Weijers et al.,1992;Wellman et al.,1996). Few early studies in
the 20s discussed the positive and negative aspects of rem ote
work, mainly discussing telework as a novel aspect of business
establishment (Fraser and Gold, 2001;Barsness et al.,2005)
while offering potential avenues for further investigation in this
domain (Baruch, 2000;Bailey and Kurland, 2002;Ga jendran
and Harrison, 2007). Certain studies discussed legal concerns
regarding telework (Baruch and Smith, 2002) and the scientific
effectiveness of telecommuting for organizations (Hill et al.,
2003;Allen et al.,2015). Due to its theoretical significance in
addition to its practical ramifications, the research on working at
home has attracted a lot of interest in academia.
WFH, synonymously known as “Telework”or
“Telecommuting”or “remote work”is conceptualized as a
work setting where employees of an organization substitute a
part of their standard working hours while working away from
a centralized office, generally from home, to accomplish their
work while using technology to communicatewith others when
needed (Messenger and Gschwind, 2016;Allen et al.,2015).
Flexibility in work schedules has been recommended as a
means of conserving energy and reducing pollution or even
traffic(Hook et al., 2020). In the past few years, the adoption of
WFH has increased due to societal shifts (Jain et al.,2022),
technological advancement and organizational and individual
decisions (Allenet al., 2015;Raghuram et al., 2019).
Recent research revealed that IT professionals are massively
in favor of implementingthe idea of working from home into its
organizational structure (Srivastava et al., 2021). Most of the
organizations have discovered that the workers preferred the
notion of WFH since they presumed that working remotely
Decade analysis of employees’well-being
Ridhima Goel, Jagdeep Singla, Amit Mittal and Meenal Arora
Information Discovery and Delivery
Volume 53 · Number 1 · 2025 · 22–42
23
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