The Effect of Virtuality on Work Engagement through Social Presence: Moderated Mediation Effect of Team Members' Perception of Identity Entrepreneurship

Abstract

This study aims to verify the effects of virtuality in the workplace and social presence on work engagement and the moderated mediating effects of leaders' identity entrepreneurship perceived by team members. This study used a quantitative approach to collect and analyze cross-sectional survey data of remote workers in South Korea. An online survey was conducted on remote workers and 300 questionnaires were analyzed. The research findings confirmed that social presence mediated the relationship between virtuality and work engagement. Furthermore, the moderating effect of leaders' identity entrepreneurship was significant in the relationship between virtuality and social presence. As hypothesized, the moderating effect of the leaders' identity entrepreneurship perceived by the team members was confirmed. Based on the result, this study proposes the necessity of the social presence of members in a remote work environment with high virtuality. Although this study overlooked causal relationships between the variables and remote workers' home context, this study enlightens the importance of team leaders' identity entrepreneurship quality in enhancing social presence among employees in the virtual working environment. The implications of the findings were facilitating virtual communication training programs and developing identity entrepreneurship training programs for team leaders. For virtual teams, it is necessary to find the most suitable virtual communication tool for each different task.