PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS AND SUSTAINABLE TELECOMMUTING: THE IMPORTANCE OF NEED FOR CONTROL

Technological, social, economic, and organisational factors are converging to facilitate remote or distributed work trends. Telecommuting ---working at home or at some other remote location and using communication technologies in lieu of the requirement to travel to the office--- is the best known of the distributed work options. Although telecommuting is on the increase, insufficient empirical data exists in relation to this work phenomenon. Accordingly, this paper reports on the results of a recent applied study in telecommuting (Meyers, 1999). The core premise-drawing on the principles of control as a core psychological construct, in particular, Bandura’s (1986, 1997) self-efficacy theory---is that individuals differ in levels of confidence in their abilities to exercise control over important aspects of their work and personal environments. Translated to the world of telecommuting, `control’, as indicated in the present study, therefore offers useful as well as empirically-alidated perspectives concerning the experiences of 155 Australian and United States ‘corporate’ telecommuters. Findings are that the Importance of Control as a person-centred factor is a predictor of all three proxy indicators of telecommuting sustainability: telecommuter productivity, telecommuter job satisfaction, and telecommuter lifestyle satisfaction. As well, Task Mediation via Others, as a self-efficacy construct, is an additional predictor of telecommuter productivity. . However, predictor factors as empirically identified in this paper are suggested as the key influences on sustainable telecommuting, in contrast to the many intuitively appealing factors frequently suggested in the telecommuting literature. A final benefit of the study was that it serves as an inventory of personal, work, organisational, and domestic factors that telecommuters themselves indicate as important to their work efficacy. Accordingly, the study has importance for IT and HRM managers; it should also assist policy-makers and planners keen to implement telecommuting in their respective organisations.