Drawing on a national survey of 447 U.S. workers who transitioned to remote work during COVID-19, this study examined how different types of communication technologies (CTs) used for work and private life were associated with work/life conflicts and perceptions of social support across different relationship types (coworker, family, and friends). Findings indicated that work/life conflicts became aggravated when the use of CTs violated relational norms (e.g., mobile texting with coworkers and emailing with family and friends). On the other hand, uses of CTs that were perceived to offer access to social support (e.g., instant messaging with coworkers and friends) were related to lower work/life conflict. Social media (e.g., Facebook) had a direct relationship to higher work/life conflict, but an indirect relationship to lower work/life conflict through social support. Overall, findings suggest that individuals attempt to create work/life boundaries by selecting specific CTs when physical work/life boundaries are collapsed.

Building upon the job demands-resources model, this study examines how communication technology (CT) use in remote work relates to role clarity, coworker support, work overload, and, in turn, burnout to enhance sustainable worker and organizational workplace practices. By analyzing non-experimental survey data from 447 U.S. workers transitioning to remote work in 2020, we found that job demands/resources mediated the relationships between CTs and burnout, with each CT linked to specific demands/resources. Phone calls, email, and instant messaging were associated with role clarity and coworker support, mitigating burnout. Video calls were linked to higher work overload and increased burnout which can decrease worker and organizational sustainability. Our findings highlight the importance of CT use in relation to employee well-being. Supported by affordance theory, we found that each CT had unique associations with job resources and demands when CTs served as key communication channels during organizational transitions.

LGBTQ+ social media users face many choices regarding their identity and self-presentation. We examined how feelings of authentic identity performances on social media involve social affordances using an online survey of LGBTQ+ individuals (N =159) who responded to open- ended questions about their social media use and self-presentation. Results of our thematic analysis indicated that LGBTQ+ users perceive tensions between communicating authentic versus inauthentic self-representations on social media and that feeling (in)authentic can be understood through social affordances. Whereas personalization and anonymity were described as enabling authenticity, editability and privacy affordances were described as inhibiting authenticity. Other affordances, including conversation control, persistence, social presence, and network association were tension-filled, supporting and constraining authenticity depending on how the user perceived them. We discuss our findings and implications concerning future research directions regarding affordances and self-presentation.

Online support groups provide members a space to express emotions and gain emotional support, contributing to individual and organizational sustainability. Communication in these virtual spaces organizes and is simultaneously organized by member interactions and emotion expressions. To better understand how communication contributes to emotion, organizing, and meaning making, this study draws on Weick’s communication sensemaking theory and uses qualitative netnographic methods to analyze interactions in an online pet loss support group. Following pet loss, many American caregivers share their grief over the loss of a pet through online support groups, which help bereaved individuals acquire support, make sense of their experiences, and support similar others. Importantly, existing research indicates that virtual support groups provide members a safe space to engage their emotions. However, competing communication discourses uphold restrictive emotion rules across organized settings and can challenge how individuals perform their emotions. This study uses qualitative netnographic data gathered over 5 months from 106 participants, to better understand how virtual support group members used communication to understand, resist, reify, and reimagine emotions. We found that organizational members grappled with their grief at work and at home, often regulating their negative emotions in pursuit of advancing their workplace productivity and deferring to others’ expectations. Furthermore, although grieving members used communication processes to legitimize the virtual support group as an organizational safe space for displaying authentic emotions, site members controlled their emotions and reinforced managerialist discourses in their communication, demonstrating that emotion discourses are far-reaching and can contribute to or distract from sustainable healing practices. We offer implications regarding how online experiences complicate emotion rules, how safe spaces reinforce professionalism and managerialism, and how organized spaces can promote sustainable practices to support members.

While digital resources are important in the development of gender and sexual identities and are often researched, I argue that transgender identities are distinct from other LGBTQ+ experiences and active strategies for managing digital gender transitions on social networks have not been subjected to qualitative inquiry. This study pairs communication privacy management alongside 131 transgender experiences to understand commonly utilized strategies of managing potentially vulnerable information (i.e., disclosure related to gender transitions) on social media. Findings suggest that disclosing information on social media related to gender transition compels transitioning individuals to consider the publicness of their account, the openness of their information sharing, and the type of information and content they share. These themes extend literature regarding transgender social support provision and online disclosures by depicting how transitioning publicly on social media can construct counterpublics and care structures, concepts usually linked to anonymous and closed online spaces.

Changes in leadership are common in organizations, bringing about change and uncertainty for remaining organizational members. Organizational exit research commonly examines exit experiences from the perspective of exiting organizational members. We utilize sensemaking theory to explore remaining organizational members’ experiences surrounding a leader’s exit, thereby contributing to and extending this body of literature. We collected narratives from 53 participants who experienced a leader’s exit using a qualitative online survey. Results of our thematic analysis identify two important sensemaking experiences: learning about the leader’s exit and using cues to anticipate the future. Our discussion includes theoretical implications for sensemaking theory, organizational socialization, and studying remaining member experiences as a part of the organizational exit process.