After-Hours Work Connectivity: Technological Antecedents and Implications

Background: Knowledge workers have become "technologically-tethered," increasingly using mobile and communication technologies to engage in work during nonwork or "after-hours" personal time. Literature review: Research has identified several individual- and organizational-level predictors of this after-hours technology-enabled work behavior and its primarily negative consequences. However, little is known regarding the behavior's potential benefits or the ways in which it is affected by technology characteristics. Research questions: 1. How do technology characteristics affect after-hours work connectivity? 2. How does after-hours technology use affect work-life balance? Methodology: We test our hypotheses with a survey-based research design involving 312 knowledge workers, and analyze our data with covariance-based structural equation modeling. Results: After-hours work connectivity increases when the technology affords lower levels of immediacy and greater levels of concurrency, rehearsability, and reprocessability. A post-hoc analysis reveals that workers who might be expected to have low levels of after-hours work connectivity-such as those who have children at home or whose employers have a high segmentation norm-have higher levels of after-hours connectivity than their counterparts when the technology has high concurrency. We also find support for a curvilinear (inverted-U shaped) relationship between after-hours technology use and work-life balance. Conclusion: Individuals are amenable to interweaving technology-enabled work with nonwork tasks when the technology facilitates asynchronous and user-controlled interactions. Furthermore, this interweaving has a positive impact on work-life balance, up to a point. We discuss the implications of these findings for research and practice.