The Dual Effects of Team Virtuality on Employees’ Work and Life

Team virtuality not only breaks boundaries within the work domain, but also lead to the fusion of boundaries between the work and life. Previous researches on the effect of team virtuality on employees from the resource perspective mainly focused on the former situation, limiting the applicability of research in the life domain. We further explore the dual effects of team virtuality on employees’ work and life based on conservation of resources theory. Through a multilevel analysis on the matching data of 212 questionnaires collected in multistage, we find that team virtuality not only enhances employees’ sense of work control by breaking boundaries in the work domain and thus reduces work stress but also decreases psychological detachment by the fusion of boundaries between work and life and thus increases life stress. Additionally, AR use not only enhances the positive effect of sense of work control on work stress by facilitating the integration of similar resources in the work domain but also alleviates the negative effect of psychological detachment on life stress by diminishing the disparities in resources between work and life domains. The implications for the team virtuality literature and virtual work managerial practices are discussed.