The influence of global stress and perception of uncertainty avoidance on people's preferences for working in virtual organizations: The moderating effect of the personality traits

Employers are increasingly looking for extending their teams to virtual work environment. Especially after the recent pandemic Covid-19, virtual work is more important concept compared to the earlier. There are increasing number of studies aiming to find different related concepts with virtual work environment, telecommuting or remote work. One's personality traits, perceived stress level or perception of socio-cultural dimensions could be good predictors for their preferences of working in this type organizations/environment. It is important for employers to predict their prospect employees' preference for working in a virtual work environment before assigning them to a duty in such environment. This study aimed to help employers to predict their employees' preferences by looking at two relationship. The first one is the one between perceived global stress and preference of working in virtual environment; and the second one is the relationship between perception of uncertainty environment and working in virtual environment. Big five personality traits are proposed to have moderating effect to above relationships. A questionnaire used to collect data from white color employees working in various companies. Hayes' model 1 from PROCESS macro of SPSS is used to test moderating effect. Results of this study explains accepted and rejected hypothesis. Keywords: Virtual Work Environment, Remote Work, Telecommuting, Network Organizations, Virtual Organizations, Personality Traits, Global Stress, Stress, Socio-Cultural Dimensions, Uncertainty Avoidance, Job Preference, Employee Job fit