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About 36.2 million Americans will be working from home by 2025, an 87% increase from the pre-pandemic period (Ioannou, 2020). Working from home has blurred the boundaries between work, personal space, and time, creating remote work performance challenges. One major issue is the digital and non-digital distractions that decrease remote workers’ productivity. Although some remote workers can remain or increase their productivity, others can not. According to the 2021 Owl Labs survey (Owl Labs, 2021), remote workers are just as or more productive than when working in the office. However, another 2021 study by the University of Chicago (Gibbs, Mengel, & Siemroth, 2021) reports that remote work productivity declined by 8–19%, especially among women and those with children at home.
Joblist surveyed more than 1,000 workers across the US and found mixed results regarding positive and negative aspects of remote work (Mendoza, 2021). Positive aspects of remote work include having extra time with family members, doing more chores, and enjoying entertainment. Negative aspects include distractions, loneliness, and decreased mental health. However, it is unclear how effectively remote workers in various functional areas can balance home and work life, overcome distractions, and maintain remote work performance.
The global pandemic presents an ongoing challenge and opportunity for remote workers to maintain a work-life balance while coping with distractions from digital devices and family obligations. These conflicting work and life priorities can potentially result in increased stress, anxiety, and fatigue, decreasing remote work performance and reducing job satisfaction (Alexander, De Smet, Langstaff, & Ravid, 2021). Work-life disruptions are becoming a prevalent issue faced by most remote workers. When a global pandemic outbursts, most companies do not provide support and remote work plans to help employees successfully transition to remote work. Home dynamics, COVID stress, overworking, and other issues have negatively impacted not only work-life wellness but also the job performance of remote workers (Como, Hambley, & Domene, 2021). Companies facing these work-life disruptions try to understand what motivates remote workers to achieve remote work performance and work-life wellbeing. While adopting a new form of coworking space for employees (Kraus, Bouncken, Görmar, González-Serrano, & Calabuig, 2022), they also must manage how to help their workers cope with varying digital and physical distractions.
The relative impact of remote workers’ motivations and distractions on remote work performance is unclear. This study presents a research model of factors that increase and decrease remote work performance, especially digital distraction, by adopting the self-determination theory of motivation (SDT). The model focuses on what contributes to the satisfied psychological needs of remote workers when they work from home. It classifies motivations to work from home into professional and hedonistic categories to assess their relative impact on remote work performance. The theoretical separation can provide additional insights into the influence of different motivations on the remote work performance of remote workers. The following will review SDT and different motivations related to remote work performance.