Online teaching became a widespread and sometimes necessary approach during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even in today's post-pandemic era, online teaching continues to be a popular alternative to in-person instruction, offering teachers and students flexibility and convenience. In this research, however, we demonstrate the downsides of online teaching from a social support perspective. We argue that, when teachers work from home and deliver courses online, they receive less support from colleagues. This is largely because the lack of shared workspace and face-to-face interactions create barriers to support seeking and giving. At the same time, work-from-home teachers receive less support from their spouses, with the spouse legitimizing more family responsibilities for teachers based on the physical proximity of being at home. Lower levels of coworker and family support, in turn, undermine teaching effectiveness and heighten teacher strain, as work-from-home teachers miss opportunities to obtain instrumental help and become distracted by household chores. We furthermore investigate how relational dynamics with social support sources (i.e., colleagues and the spouse), reflected by team-member exchange and information sharing with the spouse, play a role in the above processes, positing that the detrimental impact of online teaching is less pronounced when teachers’ relational dynamics with social support sources are more positive. A field experiment with a sample of 122 university lecturers who were randomly assigned to either the online teaching or the in-person teaching condition (with online teachers working from home and in-person teachers working at the office) provided support for our hypotheses.

Authors:
Noriko Tan, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Jingxian Yao, Singapore University of Social Sciences, Singapore

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Noriko Tan is a University Assistant Professor/Lecturer at National University of Singapore in Singapore

See this presentation on the full schedule – Friday Schedule

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