Kanse, Lisette; Wee, Serena; Gaman, Alexis; Humphrey, Georgia; Ngamwisetkun, Sun; Rojano, Jenny

Work design research has shown that providing workers with autonomy in their job is beneficial for key outcomes like engagement, wellbeing, job satisfaction, organisational commitment and performance. The freedom for workers to choose where to perform their work tasks is a specific form of job autonomy, known as location autonomy. Recent studies have shown that workers perceive location autonomy as attractive, particularly after having experienced work-from-home arrangements during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a competitive job market, employers can use this to their advantage, not just to retain workers, but also to attract future employees.
However, research is lacking on whether signalling high levels of location autonomy in job advertisements is an effective way to attract job seekers, and on the processes through which this attraction operates. There is also a need to establish whether this attraction would manifest more strongly for talent that has tended to rule themselves out of the traditional job market based on having substantial caring responsibilities. Such insight could demonstrate how employers might be able to attract a previously untapped pool of talent and increase workplace inclusion and diversity.
Combining insights from work design theory, signalling theory, and self-efficacy theory, we conducted a between-subjects vignette study with N=357 online participants in which a job advertisement was manipulated to signal three levels of location autonomy. We hypothesized that the link between location autonomy and perceived job attractiveness would operate partially via anticipated job efficacy and partially via perceived opportunities to craft the job to one’s needs and preferences, and that caring responsibilities would strengthen the first stage of these indirect paths and the direct path.
After controlling for participant gender, data analysis using Hayes’ PROCESS (model 8) showed that the link between advertised location autonomy and job attractiveness operated indirectly via anticipated job efficacy, as well as directly. There was no evidence of an indirect path via perceived opportunities to job-craft – possibly a side-effect of the measure not covering crafting where and when one works. Contrary to expectation, caring responsibilities neither moderated the direct link between location autonomy and job attractiveness, nor the first stages of the indirect paths. A measure that assesses perceived caring demands might be more appropriate than our measure of number of dependents one has substantial caring responsibilities for. Based on our findings we encourage employers to consider signalling the highest possible levels of location autonomy in their job advertisements when recruiting.

After attending this presentation, attendees will be able to:
- distinguish work location autonomy as a specific form of job autonomy
- appraise the processes through which work location autonomy signalled in job advertisements is linked to job attractiveness
- illustrate how these links might depend on characteristics of the job seeker