For millions of employees, the debates over remote and in-person work have shifted from temporary pandemic adjustments to permanent standoffs. Many workers who discovered they preferred working from home have been ordered back to physical offices, while a smaller group of employees who thrive around coworkers find themselves isolated at kitchen tables.
A study published in Social Psychology Quarterly examines what happens when employees are stuck working in a place they do not want to be and feel powerless to change it. The researchers found that this state, which they call “work-place captivity,” is linked to lower job and life satisfaction, heightened conflict between work and personal life, and increased psychological distress.
When a work location becomes a trap
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, commuting to a central workplace was an unquestioned norm for most occupations. Once lockdowns demonstrated that many jobs could be performed from home, employee expectations shifted, creating new friction when company policies did not align with worker preferences.
Sociologists Wen Fan of Boston College and Phyllis Moen of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities wanted to understand how this friction affects employee well-being over time. To do so, they combined two long-standing concepts in social psychology: how well an environment matches a person’s needs, and how much control a person feels they have over their life circumstances.
Mismatch alone does not always cause severe stress if an employee believes they have the power to negotiate a new arrangement or change their schedule. When an unwanted arrangement is paired with a lack of control, however, it creates a psychological trap.
Fan and Moen drew inspiration from earlier research on family caregivers, such as people looking after a relative with dementia, who often experience “role captivity” when their caregiving duties feel both unwanted and inescapable. By applying this idea to the physical location of employment, the authors sought to measure who falls into work-place captivity, how people get out of it, and what it costs them emotionally.
Tracking workers across shifting schedules
To investigate these questions, the researchers analyzed data from a nationally representative panel of United States adults who had worked remotely at some point after the pandemic began. Because the researchers wanted to see how individuals’ situations changed over time, they focused on employed, non-self-employed respondents who completed at least two of three survey waves spaced six months apart: April 2021, October 2021, and April 2022.
This yielded 3,174 survey observations from 1,732 individuals. In each wave, participants reported whether they were working mainly in person or working remotely or on a hybrid schedule, and they stated how many paid days per week they would prefer to work from home in the future.
Respondents who wanted at least two remote days per week were classified as preferring remote or hybrid work, while those who wanted one day or less were grouped as preferring in-person work. Participants also rated how much choice they had over doing at least some of their work at home on a five-point scale ranging from “very little” to “very much.”
The researchers classified an employee as experiencing work-place captivity if their actual work location did not match their preference and they reported having very little, little, or only a moderate amount of choice in the matter. Alongside these employment details, the surveys measured four aspects of subjective well-being: how often job demands interfered with family or personal life, overall job satisfaction, overall life satisfaction, and recent feelings of psychological distress such as nervousness, hopelessness, restlessness, or sadness.
Who feels stuck and how they adapt
Across the one-year study period, the overall share of employees experiencing work-place captivity remained steady at 13 percent to 15 percent in each survey wave. Beneath that stable total, however, individual workers frequently moved in and out of captivity.
While 77 percent of participants avoided captivity across consecutive six-month waves and 7 percent remained stuck in both waves, 8 percent transitioned into captivity and another 8 percent transitioned out of it. In fact, among workers who were captive in a given wave, more than half (54 percent) managed to resolve their situation six months later.
Exposure to work-place captivity was not distributed evenly across the workforce, even after the researchers accounted for age, caregiving duties, partner arrangements, and state-level pandemic and economic conditions. Employees working mainly in person were much more likely to enter or remain in captivity than remote or hybrid workers, and they were 33.7 percentage points less likely to avoid captivity altogether.
Demographic and educational gaps also emerged, though not always in the ways the authors initially expected. Hispanic workers were 10.5 percentage points less likely than white workers to stay free of captivity and were more likely to remain stuck across waves, while workers without a college degree were also more vulnerable to entering and staying in captivity than college graduates.
By contrast, the analysis showed no major differences between men and women. Black employees who had worked remotely during the pandemic also did not face higher odds of work-place captivity than white employees.
The psychological toll of settling
When the researchers examined how people entered work-place captivity, two main triggers stood out. About 29 percent of new transitions into captivity happened solely because of a change in work location, and in 84 percent of those cases, the employee had moved from working at home to working in person.
Another 28 percent entered captivity because their personal preferences changed while their job stayed the same, with 84 percent of that group shifting from preferring in-person work to wanting remote work. Both ongoing captivity and newly developed captivity were associated with lower job satisfaction, lower life satisfaction, and greater conflict between work and personal life compared with never being captive.
Workers who newly transitioned into captivity also reported a spike in psychological distress, particularly when their captivity was triggered by a change in work location. The researchers checked whether clashes between work and personal life served as the underlying link explaining why captivity hurt mental health, or whether existing family conflicts changed the impact of captivity, and found that captivity took a toll on well-being largely independent of work-life conflict.
Looking at the 54 percent of captive workers who escaped the trap within six months revealed a catch in how employees adapt. Only 18 percent exited captivity solely by changing their work location, and 15 percent did so by gaining more control over where they worked.
The most common way out of work-place captivity, accounting for 40 percent of resolutions, was simply changing one’s mind. Among those who resolved captivity by shifting their preferences, 78 percent gave up a preference for remote work and decided they preferred working in person.
The authors describe this adjustment as “settling” for an existing work location when employer mandates leave few other options. While exiting captivity might sound like a relief, workers who resolved their captivity by changing their preferences actually experienced a statistically significant drop in job satisfaction.
What this means for employers and future research
For managers and business leaders, the finding that employees lose job satisfaction even when they mentally adjust to an unwanted work location carries practical weight. The authors point out that lower job satisfaction is closely tied to employee turnover in workplace research, suggesting that workers who try to talk themselves into liking an in-person mandate may still end up looking for another job with more flexibility.
The researchers also note several limitations to keep in mind when interpreting their findings. Their survey tracking ended in April 2022, meaning the study does not capture longer-term responses to the wave of corporate return-to-office mandates that followed in subsequent years.
In addition, the survey question asking how much choice workers had over “doing at least some of your work at home” could have been interpreted by some participants as bringing extra work home after hours rather than choosing their primary workplace. Finally, because the panel only recruited people who had worked from home at least once during the pandemic, the study leaves out the vast majority of frontline and non-college-educated employees whose jobs have always required them to be on site and who may feel an even deeper lack of control over their working conditions.
