Exploring Work from Home: Scale Construction and Its Use in Determining Croatian Engineers’ Job Satisfaction

Abstract

Working from home and work flexibility have been highly researched academic topics over the past forty years, and their importance was further amplified during the COVID-19 pandemic. Numerous qualitative and quantitative studies were aimed at better understanding this work arrangement, but they often encountered the challenges of limited scope and the inability to generalize their results. The goal of this study was to test the consistency of the instrument used in measuring the experiences of working from home for Croatian engineers, check the presence of its latent dimensions, and finally determine whether these dimensions could predict engineers’ job satisfaction. Three factors were extracted by exploratory factor analysis (productivity and work quality, work-life balance, and organizations’ distrust and control), while the multiple linear regression analysis ran on those factors as predictors proved that, although work-life balance does not influence job satisfaction, productivity and work quality positively predict it, while organizations’ distrust and control do so negatively.