Date of Award

5-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

College/School

College of Humanities and Social Sciences

Department/Program

Psychology

Thesis Sponsor/Dissertation Chair/Project Chair

Kevin Askew

Committee Member

Cheryl Gray

Committee Member

Michael Bixter

Abstract

Remote work has proven to be an enduring fixture of the post-pandemic global economy. Despite research on the construct proliferating in recent years, it has not yet coalesced into a unified model of why, and in which contexts, remote work produces favorable or unfavorable outcomes for employees. The present study represents the first attempt to produce such a model, utilizing a global database of over 8 million employee surveys. The findings of the present study suggest that remote work is associated with small increases in job satisfaction, intent to stay and task performance, with the former two relationships mediated by improved autonomy and work-life balance. Results further suggest that managers receive fewer benefits from remote work than do non-managers, and that individualism moderates the relationship between remote work and the two job attitudes: job satisfaction and intent to stay. While the study ultimately used a combination of confirmatory and exploratory methods, rather than a strictly confirmatory approach, it nonetheless resulted in a plausible draft of an international, modern, high-level model of remote work. A further contribution of the investigation is that it is the first to empirically examine person-level individualism in connection to remote work—a connection which has been frequently hypothesized in the literature, but had not been practical to test prior to this study due to the global sampling frame required to examine it.

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