How personal and professional characteristics shape the link between work engagement and work–home interactions during the COVID-19 transition: Evidence from Ecuador

Understanding how work-home interactions relate to work engagement is essential in organizational research. This study examined associations between bidirectional positive and negative work-home interactions and work engagement and tested whether these relationships are moderated by gender or differ across work modalities (in-person, hybrid, and remote) during the COVID-19 transition. A non-experimental, cross-sectional design was employed in Ecuador, utilizing snowball sampling to recruit 541 working individuals. We estimated the model using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), and comparisons between work modalities were conducted through multigroup analysis after establishing partial measurement invariance. The main findings indicated that Negative Home-Work Interaction and Positive Work-Home Interaction were significantly related to work engagement. Gender moderated only the Positive Home-Work Interaction, with a small effect size. Differences across work modalities emerged only for the positive work-home interaction-engagement relationship, with a stronger association in the on-site group than in hybrid and remote groups. These findings extend JD-R theory in a context of transition: engagement tends to be higher when resources into family gains and tends to be lower when home demands interfere with work. The strength of the enrichment-engagement association varies by work modality. Consequently, organizations may reinforce resources in face-to-face environments and design micro-rituals that facilitate their transfer in hybrid and remote settings, as well as to aim to limit home-work interference through policies that set realistic limits and workloads. Given the cross-sectional, time-bound evidence (Aug 2021-Jan 2022), these implications should be interpreted as provisional.