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The changing world of work is increasing demands on workers through greater need for flexibility in global collaboration. This multiple-case study uses a qualitative research approach to study context-specific job stressors and coping in ten geographically distributed work teams. Results demonstrate the complex and dynamic nature of the stress-coping process and how coping strategies, adapted to manage stress-evoking uncertainty and ambiguity in distributed work, created secondary sources of psychological strain to individuals. The main strategies for managing the uncertainty and ambiguity in the studied teams were extensive emailing, travelling to face-to-face meetings and extending workdays to collaborate simultaneously across time zones. Continuously used, these coping strategies created work overload and strain. Experienced workers, who had good self-management skills, succeeded in coping with these secondary sources of strain by prioritizing and setting clear limits for workload. Less-experienced workers were overloaded and needed more social support from their leaders and teammates. The study proposes that distributed team members rely heavily on individual coping resources, because spatial and temporal distance hinders or even precludes the mobilization of social resources related to emotional, instrumental and informational social support.

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Virtual work arrangements, whereby dispersed employees interact with each other using technology-mediated communication, can both positively and negatively impact their psychological well-being. Yet, research on these dual effects in different virtual work research domains (e.g., telecommuting, virtual teams, and computer-mediated work) is not well integrated, which limits insights into how their findings overlap and inform each other. Using a work design theoretical lens to synthesize findings from 115 empirical articles, we develop an integrative framework that advances understanding of how virtual work both helps and harms employee well-being. The framework explicates different pathways linking subdimensions of technology dependence and dispersion—two core dimensions underlying different types of virtual work—to well-being through employees’ perceived work characteristics. We identify four technology dependence and three dispersion subdimensions that differ in their degree of positive versus negative impact on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being outcomes as well as in the work characteristics that explain these effects. These findings suggest that employees’ well-being experiences in virtual work depend on the subdimensions involved and that the same subdimension can influence well-being both positively and negatively. Across the subdimensions, a dominant set of work characteristics in four categories (task, knowledge, social, and work context) explain virtual work’s dual effects on well-being, moderated by contingencies at different levels (individual, team, organization, and external context). These multilevel contingencies point to potential interventions for enhancing the benefits and mitigating the downsides of virtual work for employee well-being. Based on these insights, we develop a future research agenda and discuss practical implications.

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