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How felt obligation and organization engagement mediate the relationship between perceived organizational support and work life balance amid COVID-19 pandemic: empirical evidence from emerging countries

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Abstract

Drawing from Organizational support theory (OST), we develop and test a mediation model of felt obligation and Organizational Engagement (OE) between Perceived Organizational Support (POS) and Work Life Balance (WLB). Specifically, we examine the moderating effect of ethnic dissimilarity on the mediating effect of felt obligation between POS and WLB in the context of COVID-19 pandemic with aims to provide nuanced understanding of how the pandemic influences employees’ POS, felt obligation, OE, and WLB to advance OST and extant POS literature. Based on a sample of 467 academics from China and Malaysia. Ethnic dissimilarity is found to be a salient moderator as our results reveal that felt obligation mediates the relationship between POS and WLB in the homogeneous sample but not in the heterogeneous sample through the lens of social exchange. In addition, under the self-enhancement mechanism, our result reveals that OE mediates the relationship between POS and WLB in the samples. Overall, it is envisaged that our findings are timely, and offer valuable theoretical and practical implications for organizations and employees in the COVID-19 pandemic.

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The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due the data is required to be kept confidentially which requested by third party but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

Authors would like to express their gratitude to all authors for their support of this project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Business and Finance, Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman, Petaling Jaya, Malaysia

    Luen Peng Tan, Kum Lung Choe, Yuen Onn Choong & Yin Kuan Ng

  2. College of Management, Mahidol University, Salaya, Thailand

    Parisa Rungruang

  3. Business School, Huaqiao University, Quanzhou, China

    Zhen Li

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  1. Luen Peng Tan
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  2. Kum Lung Choe
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  4. Yin Kuan Ng
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Correspondence to Yuen Onn Choong.

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Tan, L.P., Choe, K.L., Choong, Y.O. et al. How felt obligation and organization engagement mediate the relationship between perceived organizational support and work life balance amid COVID-19 pandemic: empirical evidence from emerging countries. Curr Psychol 43, 17866–17878 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-05254-0

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