Larissa K. Barber

Employees often feel obligated to respond to work messages like emails and texts immediately – a psychological experience known as workplace telepressure. Telepressure is an important problem to address given its link to work burnout. Disconnection policies that encourage employees to unplug after work hours have been a popular solution adopted by many organizations. Yet the benefits of such policies – or explicit norms – for addressing telepressure are unknown. Surveys among two worker samples suggest that the presence of disconnection policies is not associated with telepressure among employees. Only implicit norms about e-work communications specifically (after-hours availability expectations) and work prioritization generally (low family-supportive work environments) predicted telepressure. Most employees also did not think a policy would be beneficial and anticipated problems (with flexibility). Therefore, interventions aimed at creating a supportive disconnection culture for both e-work communications and work generally may be more helpful than policies.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have become an integral part of conducting work, ranging from email and sharing documents remotely to having virtual video meetings. Drawing from a self-regulation framework, this chapter highlights three self-regulatory impairment aspects of ICT use that contribute to lower psychological well-being: behavioural flexibility, cognitive load, and emotional demands. Although research on ICT-related interventions is relatively nascent, we outline potential self-regulatory strategies (i.e., managing behavioural boundaries, resetting expectations, and regulating emotions) to facilitate healthy technological behaviours and enhance psychological well-being. These strategies offer practical recommendations to practitioners and organizations, along with future directions for researchers.

The use of information and communication technology (ICT) in the workplace has gained considerable research attention in the occupational health field due to its effects on employee stress and well-being. Consequently, new ICT-related constructs have proliferated in occupational health research, resulting in a need to take stock of both potential redundancies and deficiencies in the current measures. This paper disentangles ICT-related constructs, developing a taxonomy of ICT-related constructs in terms of ICT demands, resources, motivation, use, and strains. We then integrate this taxonomy with stress and motivation theories to identify three key implications for ICT and workplace health research and practices in terms of providing suggestions on understudied areas for building better theories, highlighting important psychometric issues for building better constructs and measures, and offering recommendations for building better interventions. This review aims to serve as a guide for researchers to move forward with the current state of research and provide recommendations for organizations in terms of both potential repercussions and best practices for ICT use in the workplace.

This project explored social evaluations of electronic multitasking during work meetings, including factors that may affect whether it is seen as a counterproductive meeting behavior. We used an experimental vignette design to test whether social evaluations (norm violating, agency, and communalism) of a hypothetical coworker’s electronic multitasking differed by whether the secondary task was relevant to the meeting (Study 1; N = 274) or ambiguous (Study 2; N = 188). Observers evaluated task-irrelevant multitasking as more of a norm violation and less communal compared to task-relevant multitasking, and work-related tasks were evaluated as more agentic than nonwork-related tasks. Ambiguous tasks were also rated as more agentic than task-irrelevant multitasking. Taken together, our results show that the nature of the secondary task reduces negative perceptions of coworkers’ electronic multitasking behavior during meetings. However, electronic multitasking for any purpose, even if relevant, was generally judged negatively consistent with expectations for a counterproductive meeting behavior.