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The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Wellbeing

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Author: Monideepa Tarafdar, Jean-François Stich

Pub. Date: 2021
Product: Sage Reference
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529757187
Keywords: virtual, wellbeing, social interaction, offices
Disciplines: Business & Management, Organization Studies, Organizational Behavior, Organizational
Culture, Stress in Organizations
Access Date: March 3, 2024
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: 55 City Road
Online ISBN: 9781529757187

© 2021 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved.

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Virtual Work, Technology and Wellbeing

Monideepa Tarafdar Jean-François Stich

Introduction

Information technology (IT) has enabled work to be conducted beyond the physical confines of the physical of-
fice and beyond the temporal confines of the nine-to-five office hours. Virtual work refers to work that, through
the use of IT, enables employees to work and interact across geographical and temporal boundaries (Raghu-
ram et al., 2019). In this chapter, we define virtual work as the commonly understood work arrangements that
are not accomplished in the physical office (e.g., remote work, telecommuting) and that are made possible
through a range of IT such as computers, smartphones, email, video-conferencing tools and intranets. While
virtual work has been around for a long time, every single citizen of the world has been jolted into noticing it
since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. An article in the Financial Times recently noted,‘In six weeks we've

taken almost the entirety of the back offices of corporate America [indeed in all countries]1 and moved them to
kitchens and living rooms and it's been pretty seamless, (Morris et al., 2020). Furthermore, a number of sur-
veys have reported that once the pandemic winds down, it is unlikely that the nature of office work will go back
to what it was before (Dombey and Hall, 2020). It is expected that the new ways of working will involve more
people working virtually without going into a physical office. A key distinction between virtual and non-virtu-
al work is the indispensable and vital role of IT. Every single work task executed by the individual that does
not require the actual manipulation of physical objects – ranging across interacting with colleagues, analysing
problems, conducting meetings, communicating with customers and suppliers – is mediated through an IT
application. Indeed, as we have discovered since countries started locking down one by one starting in March
2020, ‘working’ means getting tasks done by looking into a screen to make sense of text, voices, faces and
people. Put plainly – such relentless dependence on IT causes stress. ‘Zoom fatigue’ is now an expression
familiar to almost every office (non!)going employee (Fosslien and Duffy, 2020).

The goal of this chapter is to shine a light on the stress caused by virtual work and its effects on organizational
wellbeing. We suggest that virtual work creates stress in two ways (Figure 11.1). In the first, through the top
path, it increases work-related stressors by adversely affecting work relationships and work–life balance, and
by increasing workload. Through the bottom path, it increases technostress, that is, the stress from the use

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of technology, by intensifying technostress-creating conditions. Through each of these paths, virtual work can
have non-beneficial impacts on organizational wellbeing. In the rest of the chapter we examine how these
effects come about, thereby highlighting the importance of the virtual work context for understanding and re-
searching organizational wellbeing.

Figure 11.1 The impact of virtual work on organizational wellbeing

Virtual Work and Work Stress

Virtual work changes the way work is conducted and, through that, influences the way work creates stress.
Traditionally, work has been perceived to be stressful when work relationships are dysfunctional, when
work–life balance and job security are compromised or when workloads are too intense (Faragher et al.,
2004). Virtual work has opened up new risks by transforming these traditional work stressors (Stich, 2020),
such as when bullying becomes cyberbullying (Baruch, 2005), or when 24/7 information overload worsens
feelings of work overload (Barley et al., 2011). In this section, we review how the impact of virtual work affects
three traditional work stressors, namely, work relationships, workload and work–life balance.

Work Relationships

Organizations are places of social relationships and interactions. Yet ‘having to live and work with others can
be one of the most stressful aspects of life' (Sutherland and Cooper, 2000: 98). The exposure to perpetual and
demanding social interactions can be difficult to bear. At first, virtual work may seem to be a way to reduce
the stress from demanding social interactions at work because it enables people to work in places away from
the office/colleagues, such as from home, trains, planes, co-working spaces, cafes or public parks. For em-

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ployees who wanted such ‘escape', bringing work away from the office can reduce the emotional exhaustion
induced by social interaction (Windeler et al., 2017). Virtual work can also offer respite from office politics
(Mann and Holdsworth, 2003), background noise (e.g., background hum of conversations) and interruptions
(e.g., unexpected/unwanted hallway encounters) that can make social interactions mentally exhausting (Fon-
ner and Roloff, 2010).

However, all changes are not for the better. Virtual work can be an isolating experience (Cooper and Kurland,
2002), where employees become ‘out of sight and out of mind’ and are left out of important email threads
or important information (Hemp, 2009). Furthermore, employees are often ill-equipped and under-trained to
communicate through asynchronous means such as email (Soucek and Moser, 2010). Such communication
can be difficult to interpret, especially in the absence of visual cues (Byron, 2008). For example, email mes-
sages can be erroneously interpreted as hostile, lead to aggressive responses and, thus, conflict escalation
(Friedman and Currall, 2003). For instance, messages that contain capital letters or exclamation points for
emphasis tend to be (mis)perceived as hostile (Turnage, 2007), although that may not have been the sender's
intent. Lacking the real-time feedback necessary to self-regulate, individuals may shoot off a response based
on their (mis)interpretation of an email, and not realizing their mistake until they receive a response. They may
also not be aware of lack of clarity in their communication. Research shows that people tend to overestimate
the clarity of their own email (e.g., in nuances such as humour) even when the recipient does not think so
(Kruger et al., 2005)! Such lack of agreement is stressful to both senders and recipients (Brown et al., 2014)
and can inadvertently damage work relationships (Friedman and Currall, 2003), thereby creating stress.

More alarmingly, electronic communication makes it easier to diminish and damage the social dimension of
work because individuals can ‘hide’ behind virtual communication (or non-communication). Virtual work has
created the risk for ‘electronic’ incivility and bullying (Baruch, 2005; Lim and Teo, 2009). Studies have found
that over 80% of their participants experienced negative virtual encounters in the previous six months (Coyne
et al., 2017). Intimidations and insults are common forms of ‘cyber incivility’ conducted through email (Baruch,
2005). Indeed, a new form of incivility related to virtual work is to ‘say nothing’ – it is easy to ignore specific
colleagues by not replying to email from them if one does not want to acknowledge their views and contri-
butions or show interest in them (Lim and Teo, 2009). Over time, when such negative experiences become
repeated against the victim, they may transform into ‘cyberbullying’ (Farley et al., 2016), the virtual extension
of work bullying (Baruch, 2005). Cyberbullying has even been found to be more damaging and stressful than
traditional bullying, because bullied employees have more difficulty in detaching psychologically from it, given
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that it occurs anytime and anywhere and does not need a face-to-face encounter (Coyne et al., 2017).

Even for those employees who do not actually do virtual work but work with colleagues who do, there is trou-
ble. They tend to be more frequently interrupted than before, as the burden of having to deal with people who
stop by the office is now solely on them (Yap and Tng, 1990). They tend to handle more tasks by themselves,
perhaps because they feel the remote colleagues may be difficult to reach or may not respond in a timely
manner (Golden, 2007). They find themselves between a rock and a hard place – on the one hand their work
relationships are damaged by their colleagues’ doing virtual work, and on the other they feel denied the ben-
efits of virtual work (Rockmann and Pratt, 2015).

Work–Life Balance

Stress stemming from conflict between work and home roles is transformed due to virtual work (Cooper et al.,
2001). In traditional work settings, the interface between work and home gets blurred when emotions trans-
fer from one role to the other or when work hours are extended in order to meet deadlines. Virtual work has
provided employees with the means to bring work away from their offices and beyond their office hours. Gen-
erally, this is perceived as a work benefit. Employees ask for and negotiate ‘flexible work hours’ to be able to
work from home (Bayazit and Bayazit, 2017). Such flexibility reduces commuting time and provides autono-
my as to when and where to work, so that work and personal demands can be better balanced (e.g., doing
sport, running errands, taking care of children) (Wheatley and Bickerton, 2016). This sort of flexibility, howev-
er, comes with constant connectivity (Stich et al., 2015).

Indeed, the autonomy employees believe they will find in virtual work is often counterbalanced by work pres-
sures that constrain such autonomy (ter Hoeven et al., 2016). The capacity to work anytime, anywhere, often
‘leashes’ employees, and creates difficulties for them to disengage from work (Boswell and Olson-Buchanan,
2007). Constant connectivity has even been presented as a form of addiction (Mazmanian et al., 2013), as
inboxes and devices are compulsively monitored. Employees are becoming aware of this trade-off between
autonomy and work–life conflict; some have even sued their employers, who they hold as liable, for their ad-
diction to virtual work (Kakabadse et al., 2007)! In France, for example, a company was asked to compensate
a former employee for all the time he had to spend monitoring his corporate smartphone and responding to
emails outside office hours (Samuel, 2018). The logic was that the employee had been ‘on call', for which

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compensation was due. As can be seen in these examples, work demands pile up even outside office and
office hours, thereby threatening the balance between work and home.

Employees engaged in virtual work may try to use evening hours to catch up with the work emails they did not
find the time to handle during their office hours. The time spent for family or personal matters is thus reduced,
and so is employees’ energy. When working from home, conducting even small work tasks in downtime bears
the risk of interfering with personal and family time (Derks et al., 2015). Personal activities may have to be
interrupted in order to respond to an urgent work demand, thereby creating work–life conflict (Delanoeije et
al., 2019). Conversely, personal and family demands may push virtual workers to interrupt work tasks (Dela-
noeije et al., 2019). Either ways, it takes time and cognitive effort to get back into what one was doing before
the interruption, which is stressful. Such interruptions are, however, less stressful for employees who prefer
to integrate work and home roles (Gadeyne et al., 2018) or who are highly engaged (Derks et al., 2015).

Workload

Workload is an important source of stress, both when it is in excess (i.e., overload) and in deficit (e.g., bore-
dom) (Cooper et al., 2001). Virtual work is often presented as a way to facilitate the quick sharing of business-
critical information, and thus as a way to increase productivity (Sumecki et al., 2011). In practice, however,
virtual work has also created new work demands for employees, leading to increased perceptions of workload
stress.

Virtual work allows information to flow freely, and with less constraints than in a traditional work setting. For
instance, prior to electronic communication and photocopies, employees who desired to transmit typed doc-
uments to multiple recipients had to reproduce them using carbon papers. Such ‘carbon copying’ was very
time-consuming, as each iteration could only copy the original document approximately five times. In virtual
work, ‘carbon copies’ – CCs – are done instantaneously and effortlessly using email, with unlimited numbers
of recipients. This feature tends to be misused by employees, who often lack the necessary training, under-
standing or empathy to judge who really needs to receive their messages (Soucek and Moser, 2010; Stich et
al., 2017). This results in large volumes of emails being exchanged. Furthermore, emails arrive continuously
and continue to pile up even in the employee's absence. Dealing with such amount of information is time-
consuming, which is one reason why virtual work tends to increase work overload stress (Barley et al., 2011;

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Stich et al., 2019a). It has been estimated that employees spend, on average, 29 minutes per day reading
email (Jackson et al., 2006). Even more time is thus lost to write and answer emails, or to manage, sort and
clean email inboxes (Kalman and Ravid, 2015). The increase in workload stress because of virtual work is
not specific to email, and has been found across a range of IT such as enterprise social networking or video-
conferencing (Stich et al., 2017).

An additional way through which virtual work may increase perceptions of workload stress is through interrup-
tions. Although employees are also interrupted in traditional workplaces, virtual work has extended the reach
of interruptions and allowed them to be ‘tapped on the shoulder virtually’ (Stich et al., 2017). Virtual interrup-
tions (e.g., incoming emails) are difficult to resist and insidiously disrupt employees’ workflows. Employees
believe they only react to incoming emails every hour (Renaud et al., 2006), but the reality shows that the ma-
jority of incoming emails are reacted to within five minutes (Renaud et al., 2006) and sometimes even within
six seconds (Jackson et al., 2001). Although email software can be set up so that emails are only retrieved
on a certain interval, the default setup is to retrieve emails every five minutes, and most employees leave
their inboxes open all day and handle emails as they arrive (Barley et al., 2011). Additionally,there may be
interruptions by family members and home demands (Delanoeije et al., 2019). The amount and frequency of
interruptions has thus been shown to be higher in virtual work (e.g., emails, phone calls) (Van Solingen et al.,
1998). It then takes from one to 15 minutes to reengage in the task at hand (Jackson et al., 2001; Van Solin-
gen et al., 1998), unless the interruption brought information that was needed for the task. Handling these
interruptions thus consumes a significant amount of time, estimated at 29 minutes per day (Gupta and Shar-
da, 2008). This loss thus increases employees’ workloads, and the associated stress (Stich et al., 2019a).

In this section we have explained how virtual work can exacerbate the work stressors associated with work
relationships, work overload and work–life conflict. In the next section we examine how virtual work can ag-
gravate conditions that create technostress, that is, the stress emanating from the use of IT.

Virtual Work and Technostress

The inexorable relationship between virtual work and IT has been poignantly revealed by the current pan-
demic, which has necessitated the sustained and relentless use of all kinds of applications to execute organi-
zational work. IT applications for virtual work include aids for asynchronous (e.g., email tools and data-repos-
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itory tools such as OneDrive) and synchronous (e.g., virtual meeting and file-sharing tools such as Teams
and Zoom, and chat tools such as Slack) communication. They also include enterprise workflow applications
through which tasks and business processes such as order processing, invoicing, and customer relationship
management are executed.

Technostress-Creating Conditions from Virtual Work

We have known for quite some time now that use of IT can be a source of stress in the workplace, referred
to in the literature as technostress. IT users experience technostress because they perceive the demands
made by IT as threatening to their organizational wellbeing (Tarafdar et al., 2019). Such demands can come
from the very characteristics of IT that are perceived as beneficial, such as anywhere–anytime connectivity,
availability, device and application reliability, anonymity of interaction, and constant novelty and newness of
features and functionalities (Ayyagari et al., 2011). Envisaged and intended to be useful, and to a large extent
they are indeed, these technology characteristics, when taken to the extreme, can cause conditions that IT
users perceive as stressful.

The literature has revealed different technostress-creating conditions (see Tarafdar et al., 2019). Many of
these conditions are particularly relevant for virtual work. For example, techno-invasion embodies the inva-
sive effect of IT in situations where employees can be reached anytime and anywhere. Particularly in the case
of virtual work, because there are no physical interactions during the usual nine-to-five workday, employees
may feel the need to be constantly ‘online', either checking email or reporting their presence on applications
such as Teams. While the upside of this may be that managers perceive them as active and responsive, the
downside is constant tethering to work. Indeed, the overwhelming feeling associated with techno-invasion is
that IT pervades every aspect of work life, and since work life is constantly accessible through IT, it is easy to
get to a situation where the workday never ends (Eurofound and the International Labour Office, 2017). The
individual faces the demand from IT use of always being connected to work, and feels invaded.

A second salient technostress-creating condition for virtual work is techno-overload. Simply put, IT forces the
pace of work. In virtual work, given the lack of a physical cut-off of meetings and interactions, work-related
information is electronically generated and keeps coming at employees almost non-stop. In contrast to face-
to-face interactions that are bound by the physical limitations of speech and eye contact, information gener-
ated electronically can be done at a much greater pace because one does not have to react to such cues,
especially for asynchronous interactions. Co-workers can engage in quick virtual interactions and response,

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such as answering emails and text messages quickly and in real time, leading to relentless and rapid back
and forth of work-related communication and a corresponding increase in the pace of work. Further, analysing
social cues is difficult in video-conferencing and places additional cognitive burden on the individual, who has
to do more work just to understand what the other person is actually saying or thinking. A recent article (Ja-
cobs, 2020) sums it up well: ‘You are trying to see how everyone's reacting … You dart your eyes across the
screen to see how engaged they are. When people are joining calls they are probably still emailing. I leave a
call and think, “Oh gosh, did I get my point across, did I lose that person?”’ Worse, even with all the synchro-
nous video-conferencing, asynchronous demands do not reduce; there is always the next file to read and the
next email to answer before calling it a day. Email overload (Dabbish and Kraut, 2006), information overload
and communication overload (Hemp 2009) are fallouts of techno-overload.

Another IT-related stress creator for virtual work is techno-complexity. It is simply a fact of virtual work that IT
users have to understand and learn about the features of the applications. Not doing so adversely impacts
their ability to get the job done. They are forced to spend time and effort in figuring out how to use various
functions, especially if their colleagues are using them. For example, while most people use applications such
as Teams for virtual meetings, not many use them for file sharing, where use of email is more prevalent. If one
is in a committee where other members prefer to share files using Teams, one may feel compelled to do the
same, and feel inadequate if they did not. This sort of hidden work is never accounted for in the employee's
regular work tasks. It places the demand on the employee to learn complex things that are not directly part of
their actual work and which they do not get credit for in their performance evaluations. After all, a salesperson,
for example, gets their raise based on the extent to which they fulfil their sales quota, and not on how well
they can use customer relationship management applications for tracking customers. And yet they have to
learn the features of such applications in order to do their work. Such activities place a demand on employees
to deal with complexity borne out of the use of IT which adversely affects their performance (Tarafdar et al.,
2015).

To make matters even worse, enterprise applications keep changing as organizations buy new software and
upgrade existing versions. Therefore, just using the technology itself can be unsettling because users have to
be on the alert for installing and updating applications, especially security-related patches and upgrades. As
a result, they experience what is known as techno-uncertainty. Timely response and support from the IT help
desk (which is also IT-mediated as one has to fill out online forms!) is not always a given. Indeed, one of the
most stressful aspects of IT use in virtual work is the threat that comes from not ensuring that the software
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one is using is up-to-date; not doing so can lead to lack of compliance and policy violation.

Who Is More Prone to Technostress from Virtual Work?

While there is not much empirical research on who may be more susceptible to technostress, we do know
that certain personality and individual characteristics can influence the extent to which employees experience
technostress. One important factor here is personality (Srivastava et al., 2015). Individuals with obsessive
compulsive personalities or neurotic dispositions have a tendency to perceive difficult situations as threaten-
ing (Spector et al., 2000). Such individuals may perceive the reliability and constant availability of technology
as presenting requirements to be available for work round the clock, feel insecure about missing out on impor-
tant matters if they are not, and be disturbed by the blurring of boundaries between work and home. Another
important factor to be considered is the individual's technology self-efficacy (Compeau and Higgins, 1995),
that is, the extent to which the individual thinks he or she is capable of using IT. Those with a high technology
self-efficacy can have a negative influence on the extent to which the individual experiences negative effects
from the presence of technostress-creating conditions (Tarafdar et al., 2015). Indeed, people with low self-ef-
ficacy are more likely to feel threatened when faced with greater job demands in terms of higher workload
and need for responsiveness (Schaubroeck and Merritt, 1997). Low technology self-efficacy can reduce the
individual's confidence in dealing with IT. Is it possible to find a sweet spot where the individual can harness
the capabilities of technology and at the same time not be stressed by them? One way to reduce the extent
to which the individual experiences technology-related stress is to bring about a fit between their own needs
and their environment. Research shows that in the case of use of email applications, for example, individuals
who perceive a greater fit between the extent of email use they want to engage in and are actually engaged
in experience a lower extent of work-related stress (Stich et al., 2019b).

Can Organizations Make It Better or Worse?

Technostress can lead to a plethora of negative outcomes detrimental to both the individual and the organi-
zation (Tarafdar et al., 2019). Job-related negative outcomes include low job satisfaction, task performance,
innovation and organizational commitment, and high turnover intentions, role overload, role conflict and job-
related anxiety (Ragu-Nathan et al., 2008; Sprigg and Jackson, 2006; Tarafdar et al., 2007). Negative well-

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being-related outcomes include exhaustion, burnout and strain (Ayyagari et al., 2011; Barber and Santuzzi,
2015; Barley et al., 2011; Reinke and Chamorro-Premuzic, 2014). Moreover, individuals who experience tech-
nostress are frustrated with many aspects of IT use, and are often unwilling or reluctant to comply with secu-
rity requirements (D'Arcy et al., 2014).

What can organizations do to help? Employees working virtually find it easy to be available outside of work
hours and/or respond immediately to work communication coming through email, chat messages on appli-
cations such as Slack, or postings coming through on social networking applications (Barber and Santuzzi,
2015). Very often, and in the absence of clear organizational expectations and guidelines, they do make
themselves available and do respond immediately, even if they experience, for example, techno-invasion. It
is necessary that organizations frame explicit guidelines for technology use. Such guidelines should have a
dual objective – to help employees take advantage of the capabilities of IT and at the same time to avoid
technostress. For example, recognizing the flexibility that is possible from virtual work, such policies can en-
courage employees to shape their own work patterns and at the same time adjust to their colleagues’ work
patterns. In our experience, this is not always the case and organizations are not proactive enough about de-
veloping such guidelines. Increasingly, users are taking matters into their own hands and shaping their own
responses. The first author cites an example from a colleague's email signature – ‘Please note that whilst I
may choose to correspond by email during evenings and weekends as it fits best with my preferred work-
ing pattern, I do not expect responses during these times'. Here, this individual is sending a clear message
about their expectations to co-workers. Similarly, individuals can also frame strategies for answering emails,
for example, stating that they will not answer emails during specific times, as a work practice. Research also
shows that organizational conditions that inhibit the negative effects of technostress creators include the pres-
ence of remote IT helpdesk support and technology manuals for employees to access (Ragu-Nathan et al.,
2008). Ironically enough, IT itself can help employees cope. For example, email filters can route emails to
specific folders automatically, thereby helping users manage the flow of incoming email (Soucek and Moser,

2010). Smartphones have apps (e.g., Google's Digital Wellbeing app2) that provide users with information
about which apps they use and how frequently, with the aim of helping them develop habits for ‘unplugging'.
Individuals can thus leverage certain IT to make virtual work a less stressful experience.

Organizations can also do things to make it worse! For example, with virtual work exists the possibility of
digital monitoring and surveillance, which can come in many forms – email and Internet use monitoring, appli-

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cation use monitoring and client interaction monitoring (Miller and Weckert, 2000; Stanton and Weiss, 2000).
Indeed, many office communication application suites now provide dashboards of the employees’ use of var-
ious applications such as email. Such monitoring can generate fears of job insecurity, loss of privacy and
infringement of personal space (Zuboff, 2015), further aggravating the negative impacts of technostress. Cop-
ing with technostress is a matter of individual action and one size does not fit all (Tarafdar et al., forthcoming).
Therefore, the other thing that organizations can do to make it worse is to mandate how IT ‘should’ be used,
completely disregarding both the flexibility offered by IT and the individual's productive appropriation of its
features. In this context, organizational policies that, for example, prohibit or limit the use of email during cer-
tain times of the day are less helpful than those that suggest to employees various ways of reducing email
overload, leaving them to decide what works best for them.

Conclusion

So, where do we stand with regard to the effect of virtual work on organizational wellbeing? By changing the
ways work is conducted, virtual work changes the experience of organizational wellbeing. Traditional work
stressors such as relationships, work–life balance and workload are affected in adverse ways. The depen-
dence on IT makes work relationships more difficult to maintain and work itself more difficult to contain, es-
pecially for employees who are less able to manage the interruptions, ambiguity and pervasiveness of com-
puter-mediated communication. Employees may clearly appraise IT as the culprit of their work overload or
work–life invasion, thereby making IT a stressor of its own. Having to use IT and cope with its complexity can
also be a stressful experience by itself. Individual characteristics and organizational interventions can, how-
ever, help to cope with such work stressors. There are a number of ways of doing so, for instance by training
users to help them gain confidence in using IT, or by developing organizational guidelines for IT use.

This book chapter has attempted to develop links between the literature on work stress and technostress, in
the context of virtual work. To date, these two streams have been researched separately – in occupational
psychology for the former and in information systems for the latter (Tarafdar et al., 2019). Our interdisciplinary
approach suggests that they may be investigated together by distinguishing the impacts of technology-related
stressors and work stressors on organizational wellbeing (Figure 11.1). Investigating them together opens
up new avenues for future research and for enriched understanding of virtual work stress. On the one hand,

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the information systems discipline brings theoretical frameworks to bear on IT design, IT implementation, IT
use and end user perceptions characteristics. On the other hand, occupational psychology brings theoretical
frameworks on stress (e.g., transactional stress, person–environment fit) to interpret the effect of IT on orga-
nizational phenomena. Future research may try to combine these complementary literature strands to better
explain the process of virtual work stress. Furthermore, we note that some aspects of virtual work stress re-
main currently understudied. Coping mechanisms have rarely been examined in the context of virtual work.
Although technostress has been researched in various contexts such as social networks (Tarafdar et al.,
2020) or corporate IT (Tarafdar et al., 2007), it has not been researched in the contexts of virtual teams and
telecommuting, which are important virtual work arrangements. Finally, research is only starting to investigate
the positive challenges and outcomes that can be associated with virtual work in the form of techno eustress
(Tarafdar et al., 2019) and its associated effects on organizational wellbeing.

Virtual work brings much to organizations and individuals in terms of productivity (Stich et al., 2015) and
worldwide connectivity (Raghuram et al., 2019). It is largely desired and well-received among organizations
and individuals alike. It is therefore important to understand and tackle its negative influence on organizational
wellbeing to leverage the benefits. We suggest that it is necessary to take stock of its limitations and research
ways to address and mitigate its stressful aspects.

Notes

1 Added by authors.

2 https://wellbeing.google/

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• virtual

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• wellbeing
• social interaction
• offices

https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529757187

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