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The present study integrates inclusive leadership and protection motivation theory to propose a new model predicting employees' intention to work from home during an emergency situation such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

A questionnaire was developed to collect data from 939 Taiwanese and Vietnamese office employees using a non-probability convenience sampling method. A total of 887 valid questionnaires were used for further analysis. The data were analysed following a two-stage structural equation modelling using SPSS 22 and AMOS 20 software. The validity and reliability of the instrument were tested and ensured.

The results revealed that inclusive leadership and factors related to protection motivation theory– including perceived severity and perceived vulnerability – have positive direct and indirect effects on employees' work-from-home intentions through the mediating role of employees' work-from-home-related attitudes. Protection motivation theory factors were found to have a stronger effect on employees' work-from-home intention than inclusive leadership. Differences in the relationship between perceived vulnerability, perceived severity and employees' intentions towards working from home were also discovered among participants from the two studied countries.

The integration of inclusive leadership and protection motivation theory brings into light what will drive employees' intention to work from home during an emergency situation. The present study has several theoretical and practical implications for scholars, governments, managers and policymakers that can help them improve management policies for working from home in the future.

Based on integrating inclusive leadership and protection motivation theory to explore employees' intention to work from home during an emergency situation, the present study demonstrated that inclusive leadership and protection motivation theory should be considered for studies on working from home in a pandemic setting.

The current study proposes a moderated mediation model to predict work-from-home engagement during an emergency such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic based on the integration of well-known concepts, including inclusive leadership, organizational support and perceived risk theory.

An online questionnaire on the Google Forms platform was designed and distributed to Vietnamese employees using a convenience sampling method. A total of 794 valid questionnaires were used for data analysis. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed to test the proposed model and hypotheses. The instrument's validity and reliability were tested and ensured.

The study found that inclusive leadership has direct and indirect effects on work-from-home engagement through the separate and serial mediating roles of perceived organizational support and employee motivation. The present study also revealed that the effects of perceived organizational support and employee motivation on work-from-home engagement are strengthened by employee risk perception. Moreover, the study showed that perceived organizational support and employee motivation performed the lowest of the four elements that were considered, while the importance of these two factors was the highest.

These findings suggest that in an emergency such as COVID-19, contextual factors should be given more attention. Based on these findings, several theoretical and practical implications for human resource management are highlighted.

By integrating inclusive leadership, organizational support and perceived risk theory to explore employees' engagement in working from home during an emergency, the present study demonstrated that in addition to traditional factors, leadership and contextual factors should be considered for studies on working from home in an emergency such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The present study established that these factors might encourage employees' work-from-home engagement.