In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic’s outbreak, researchers have published articles and reports on the impact of the pandemic on workplace practices, prevalence of teleworking or remote work, and well-being and engagement of remote workers. However, since these articles and reports are data-driven and/or anecdotal, researchers are called for to conduct theory-driven research on management practices and employee attitudes during the COVID-19 pandemic. The purpose of this research is to theorize and empirically test the impact of COVID-19 on flexible work arrangements, including teleworking and flextime work schedules, and the effect of these work arrangements on work engagement during the pandemic, based on evidence from Australian, Singaporean, and Japanese workplaces. I draw on extant research not only on flexible work arrangements but also on organizational change, crosscultural management, and the job demand-resources （JD-R） model in order to tackle the purpose of this research. I also conduct supplementary analysis by expanding the number of countries from which I collected date. This research makes a theoretical contribution to a field of human resource management（ HRM） research as it provides theoretical foundations and empirical evidence to understand working styles and work engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic and under culturally different circumstances.
Takashi Sakikawa (Tue,) studied this question.