Remote Workers’ Privacy Concerns, Psychological Climate for Face Time, and Organizational Affective Commitment

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the shift to high-intensity remote work—three days or more a week—accelerated the digitalization of work processes on platforms such as Slack or Teams and the blurring of boundaries between work and personal life through videoconferencing and the use of personal devices for work. This paper explores the relationships between high-intensity remote workers’ information and communication technologies (ICT) privacy concerns, psychological climate for face time, and organizational affective commitment. Building on organizational support and social information processing theories, we argue that ICT privacy concerns and perceptions that an organization values physical presence in-office may undermine commitment to the organization. Based on a two-wave study of 1065 remote workers in a large multinational bank, we find that ICT privacy concerns and psychological climate for face time reinforce one another and are negatively associated with subsequent affective organizational commitment.