The Impact of Media Capabilities on Remote Work Exhaustion

The media capabilities of computer-mediated communication play a crucial role in facilitating work-related interactions. This study examines whether the media capabilities preferred by remote workers lead to or help protect against remote work exhaustion. The hypotheses were tested using both PLS-SEM and CB-SEM to ensure the robustness of the results. Results from 572 United States study participants suggest that remote workers who prefer media with high parallelism are the most likely to report remote work exhaustion. The findings show that remote workers who favor media with higher reprocessability were the second most likely to report experiencing exhaustion from remote work. However, rehearsability was found to act as a protective media capability against this form of exhaustion. Our study reveals the existence of trade-offs associated with media capabilities with important research and practice implications.