Work-Life Balance and Teleworking: Developing and Testing a Teleworker Performance Mode

Teleworking has become increasingly important for researchers and practitioners for several reasons. First, employers are outsourcing employees' work from expensive office sites to inexpensive, home-based sites to lower overhead costs and labor costs that allow employers to remain price competitive. Second, employers are trying to discover how to improve employees' productivity through work redesign that includes home-based teleworking. Third, employers are trying to discover how to facilitate work-life balance so that employees become more committed to their employers, which may increase productivity and decrease employee turnover. The specific problem of interest was that teleworker managerial perspectives about home-based teleworkers (HbTW) regarding the antecedents of their performance is not currently well understood. Teleworker performance models have not completely identified the primary sources of teleworker perceptual and behavioral performance. Consequently, if teleworker management decision-makers (TMDMs) do not develop teleworker performance models that include the most relevant variables influencing performance, TMDMs may be misallocating scarce resources and making other inaccurate decisions. The purpose of this quantitative, correlational research study was to investigate the relationships among social isolation, goal-setting, goal commitment, job satisfaction, and perceived performance of home-based teleworkers (HbTWs). The HbTW nonrandom, purposive sample was from teleworkers affiliated with The Babb Group, whose members have no specific geographical location. This sample source was an organization committed to the success of others by providing them the necessary tools and training to find fulfilling careers as online adjunct or full-time professors. Data were gathered using a single survey instrument administered in Survey Monkey. For the primary variables and possible confounding variables descriptive statistics, reliability statistics, correlation statistics, and regression statistics were performed. Based on rejecting the null hypotheses, job satisfaction had the highest correlation with perceived performance and was the only significant predictive variable for perceived performance. For researchers developing conceptual models, the recommendation was to consider expanding the theoretical teleworker performance (TTP) model. For researchers testing empirical models, the recommendation was to consider revisiting the testable teleworker performance (TTP) model. For practitioner-managers developing and testing actionable intelligence models, the recommendation was to consider adapting the GAP ideas recommended by Zimmerman, Wirfel, and Piper (2017).