Neurodiversity, Emotional Labor, and Mental Wellbeing in IT Employees

Prior research on IT employee emotional labor typically takes a situation-centric approach, emphasizing organizational rules for employee emotional demeanor as the primary driver of the phenomenon. Building on recent IS research on neurodiversity, we propose a person-centric approach and demonstrate how IT employees’ autistic traits shape their emotional labor and mental health in two survey studies with corporate IT workers. Results also indicate that IT professionals exhibit significantly higher autistic traits than the general population, with a considerable proportion exceeding clinically significant thresholds. Additionally, IT workers report more severe mental illness symptoms than the population norm. The percentages of IT workers meeting clinical thresholds for anxiety and depression are both 2.5 times of the prevalence rates in the general population. Implications for IS research and practice are discussed.