Boundary-crossing ICT use: concepts, measurement, and mental health outcomes

Purpose The widespread adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for both work and personal use significantly impacts employees' professional and private lives, drawing considerable academic interest. Despite extensive research, existing studies often fail to integrate these distinct uses into a cohesive framework, hindering a complete understanding of their varying effects on employee work and life outcomes. To address these gaps, this study introduces the concept of “boundary-crossing ICT use (BCU)”, offering a unified framework for fragmented existing concepts and proposing a new classification model. Design/methodology/approach We followed established construct measurement and validation procedures (MacKenzie et al., 2011; Shiau and Huang, 2023). Study 1 specified the construct domain and dimensionality; Study 2 generated and refined items through expert screening, EFA, and CFA; and Study 3 examined nomological validity. Notable, drawing on Conservation of Resources Theory and effort-recovery logic, Study 3 employed this scale to investigate the differentiated impacts of proactive and reactive BCU on employees' mental health, also examining the moderating role of polychronicity (the preference for engaging in multiple tasks simultaneously). Findings This study rigorously developed and validated a 20-item BCU scale, encompassing four distinct dimensions: proactive life-related, proactive work-related, reactive life-related, and reactive work-related BCU. The results demonstrate that the BCU scale exhibits strong psychometric properties, making it a reliable tool for predicting health outcomes. Originality/value This study advances research on ICT-enabled work-life boundaries by integrating previously fragmented ICT-boundary constructs into a coherent BCU framework and by developing and validating a rigorous four-dimensional BCU scale. Importantly, the scale is not only a measurement contribution, but also an enabling one: by operationalizing direction and enacted agency simultaneously, it sharpens the conceptual understanding of BCU and provides a common framework for future research to examine when and why ICT-mediated boundary crossing becomes adaptive or maladaptive.