Working Away from Home, Coping Strategies, Quality of Working Life, Well-being and Performance

Background: There has been recent interest in the problems associated with studying or working away from home. A recent model of “working away” describes appropriate coping strategies across the time course from preparing to leave home for work, adapting to work away and returning home from work. Support for this model has come from studies of international students, and the aim of the present study was to extend this to workers from Asia who work in the service industry in the Middle East.

Aims: The study aimed to examine associations between working away strategies and quality of working life, well-being and performance efficiency. Established predictors of these outcomes were statistically controlled.

Methodology: The research was carried out with the approval of the School of Psychology, Cardiff University, ethics committee and the informed consent of the participants (N=216; mean age = 38.3 years s.d. = 9.2). An online survey was carried out, and regressions were used to examine associations between the working away strategies and the outcomes.

Results: Working away strategies were significantly associated with better quality of working life, more positive well-being and better performance. An unexpected result was that these strategies were also associated with more negative well-being. This possibly reflects negative factors leading to the use of working away strategies, which subsequently lead to positive outcomes.

Conclusion: The results of this study confirm earlier research that shows associations between working away strategies and quality of working life, positive well-being and performance efficiency. The use of these strategies may initially be related to underlying stress, and their subsequent use then leads to beneficial outcomes.