Abstract
BackgroundIn the course of globalisation and digitalisation, new ways of work are becoming increasingly prevalent. To remain competitive as an organisation, cooperation across time, place, and organisational boundaries is becoming necessary. Virtual teamwork offers these advantages, but can also be both, an opportunity and a burden, for employees. This pilot study aims to gain first insights into job demands and resources in virtual teamwork to provide a basis for further research from which appropriate health promotion and prevention measures can be derived.MethodsIn this pilot study, an online questionnaire was used to examine the relationship between boundarylessness as a job demand, psychological detachment as a personal resource, as well as perceived stress and sleep quality as health outcomes among 46 virtual team members from Germany. Data collection lasted from October 2019 to January 2020. Validated scales were used for the questionnaire, except for virtuality. Due to insufficient operationalisation to date, a virtuality scale was developed based on the current state of research. The data were analysed with ordinal logistic regression analyses and median split t-tests.ResultsThe results indicate that perceived stress impaired sleep quality of virtual team members in this sample. In contrast, successful psychological detachment from work was positively related to sleep quality. A higher degree of virtuality coincided with higher levels of boundarylessness. Virtual team members with leadership responsibility showed higher levels of psychological detachment.ConclusionThe present pilot study breaks ground and provides initial insights into the relationship between virtual teamwork and employee health in the German context. Further research, particularly on job demands in virtual teamwork, is needed to derive concrete health promotion and prevention measures.
Highlights
In the course of globalisation and digitalisation, new ways of work are becoming increasingly prevalent
To reach our objective of gaining first insights into virtual team members’ mental health, we examined boundarylessness as a job demand in virtual teamwork and investigated psychological detachment as a personal resource to cope with this demand
Participants were included in data analyses based on the following inclusion criteria, (1) who worked as employees, (2) who had work experience in their current profession of at least 1 year, (3) who worked full time, and (4) who worked in virtual teams
Summary
In the course of globalisation and digitalisation, new ways of work are becoming increasingly prevalent. To remain competitive as an organisation, cooperation across time, place, and organisational boundaries is becoming necessary Virtual teamwork offers these advantages, but can be both, an opportunity and a burden, for employees. In contrast to “traditional” teams, virtual team members are distributed among different locations, collaborating interactively based on a common task and/or goal [3, 4]. They are interdependent and share responsibility for outcomes [5]. Examples of virtual teams range from team members in different departments or cities to intercultural, transnational or globally dispersed teams with members from different companies [4, 7]
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