The impact of telework on emotional experience: When, and for whom, does telework improve daily affective well-being?

Abstract

Teleworking has become increasingly popular in organizations around the world. Despite this trend towards working outside of the traditional office setting, research has not yet examined how people feel (i.e., their affective experiences) on days when working at home versus in the office. Using a sample of 102 employees from a large US government agency, we employed a within-person design to test hypotheses about the relationship between teleworking and affective well-being. We also examined four individual differences (openness to experience, rumination, sensation seeking, and social connectedness outside of work) as cross-level moderators. Results show that employees experience more job-related positive affective well-being (PAWB) and less job-related negative affective well-being (NAWB) on days when they were teleworking compared to days they were working in the office. Findings show that several of the individual differences moderated the relationships. Discussion focuses on the need to consider the affective consequences of telework and the characteristics that determine who will benefit more or less from working at home.

Keywords:

• Telework
• Personality
• Negative affect
• Positive affect

We thank the government agency representatives who partnered with us and facilitated the data collection process. In addition, we thank the associate editor and two anonymous reviewers who helped shape this article to its current form.

Notes

¹ Worth noting is that, instead of enhancing well-being, telework may, in some instances, decrease positive well-being. For example, research shows teleworkers perceive a reduction in visibility and decreased career development opportunities (Duxbury et al., 1998; Shamir & Salomon, 1985). However, here, we are focusing on affective experiences among individuals who telework regularly but not exclusively (a set amount of days per pay period), so we believe that these employees will experience more of the positive benefits of teleworking due to the fact that the negative aspects of telework tend to manifest their effects over longer periods of time among exclusive teleworkers (i.e., reduced face time resulting in stifled career advancement).

² Given that the non-respondents did not provide any data, we were not able to compare the respondents versus non-respondents on demographic or study variables. This said, we could not think of factors that would have led the current sample to be non-representative of the teleworkers in this agency. In addition, the sample demonstrated variance on key variables such as telework frequency, age, gender, supervisor status, and tenure.