Does teleworking negatively influence IT professionals?: an empirical analysis of IT personnel's telework-enabled stress

Despite the wide dissemination and acceptance of teleworking in the IT industry, companies like Yahoo!, HP, or Best Buy have stopped their telework programs, which indicates that there might also be some negative side effects in this type of work. In regard to this, our research focuses on one particular negative side of teleworking by focusing on teleworking-induced stress of IT professionals. We theorize that teleworking-induced stressors influence IT personnel's psychological and behavioral strain in the form of exhaustion due to teleworking and discontinuous intention towards teleworking. Results of an empirical online survey with 57 IT professionals validate these dependencies, which gives us the grounds to identify work overload, work-home conflict, information underload, and social isolation as influence factors of exhaustion due to teleworking. Further results reveal that discontinuous intentions towards teleworking is directly influenced by social isolation and exhaustion due to teleworking, whereas the influence of work overload is mediated by exhaustion due to teleworking. Work overload due to telework has the strongest effect on exhaustion due to teleworking, which in turn is the strongest influence factor on the discontinuous intention towards teleworking.