Heavy-Work Investment: Its dimensionality, Invariance across 9 Countries and Levels before and during the COVID-19’s Pandemic

Abstract

The goals of the current comparative and half-exploratory paper are to: 1) shed light on the properties of the relatively “new” construct, Heavy-Work Investment (HWI) and its two dimensions – Time Commitment and Work Intensity, (2) assess differences across 9 countries in relation to HWI, (3) gauge the effect of demographical parameters on HWI, and (4) investigate the interaction between them and COVID-19’s pandemic (i.e., before COVID-19, and during the COVID-19 pandemic). Data of 3,418 employees were collected from 9 different countries: Israel, Romania, Japan, USA, Pakistan, Italy, Turkey, Brazil, and Germany. Among other findings, analyses revealed that HWI construct is stable across countries and that the mean investment at work (in the form of both time and efforts) is higher during the COVID-19’s pandemic than before it. Discussion section summarizes the findings of the entire research, and elaborates on limitations and future research suggestions.

Keywords

• heavy-work investment
• scale
• cultural differences
• international
• demographics
• covid-19