The influence of remote work on exhaustion

• Autor(a) principal: Margato, Tiago Seiça
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/24044
• topic: Remote work; Workload; Psychological detachment; Exhaustion; Teletrabalho; Carga de trabalho; Distanciamento psicológico; Exaustão

The covid-19 pandemic has contributed to analyse remote work in a more strategic manner as an important part of organisations’ future, making the need to understand its impact on employees’ health even more crucial. Studies have shown that remote work can have positive effects on employees’ working life. In fact, there are job characteristics during remote work that can act as job resources by helping individuals to deal with certain job demands, thus reducing their effects and, consequently, promoting the recovery process. This study analysed the relationship between three components of remote work - job effectiveness, flexibility and work-life interference - and exhaustion considering the mediation effect of workload. Afterwards, it was measured the impact of psychological detachment during off-job time in the relationship between the three components of remote work and exhaustion. To do that, it was developed a quantitative study (N = 253) with employees working remotely in Portugal. All the hypothesis were supported by this study, excluding the hypothesis of the moderating role of psychological detachment. The results indicated that the three components of remote work are negatively related to exhaustion and workload mediates the relationship between these three components of remote work and exhaustion. Regarding the psychological detachment, this study provided evidence that when employees are able to mentally disengage from work during off-job time they experience lower exhaustion.