Burnout and Logged On: The Hidden Cost of Remote Work Policies on Employee Mental Health

The proliferation of remote work policies in the post-pandemic period has created a large scholarly and organizational interest in the psychological implications of the distributed work arrangements. The connections between the intensity of remote work policy, employee burnout, work-life control boundary, and employee mental health were analyzed in the framework of integrative mediated moderation. Based on the Conservation of Resources theory and the boundary management theory, the research reasoning included the hypothesis that employee burnout mediated the connection among the intensity of the remote work policy and mental health distress and that the work-life boundary control moderated the policy-to-burnout pathway and the entire indirect effect. Validated self-report measures were used to collect data on 354 full-time remote and hybrid workers working in knowledge-intensive sectors, such as Maslach Burnout Inventory-General Survey and the General Health Questionnaire-12. The hypothesized model was tested using structural equation modeling as well as PROCESS macro analyses with bootstrapped confidence interval. The findings affirmed that high intensity of the remote work policies was a significant predictor of burnout, the mental health condition mediated the policy-mental health relationship, and the moderating effect of the boundary control was that a low level of the boundary control significantly predicted an increased mental health decline due to the burnout channel among the employees. The moderated mediation index was significant which formally proved the existence of moderated mediation. The findings contribute to theoretical knowledge on the psychological effects of remote work and provide practical recommendations to organize matters in relation to policy design, management development, and interventions to manage the well-being of employees in the context of distributed work.