Immersive Work in the Metaverse: An Integrative Review of Collaboration, Employee Outcomes, and Organizational Adoption and Discontinuance

Abstract

Purpose. The enterprise metaverse, meaning immersive and spatial virtual workspaces for meetings, collaboration and training, was promoted as the future of work and then quickly dismissed. Research on it is split between laboratory studies of employee experience and surveys of organizational adoption intentions. This paper brings the two streams together and extends them to scaling and discontinuance. Design. An integrative review of 26 open-access, peer-reviewed sources published between 2018 and 2025, coded for platform type, level of analysis, setting, outcomes, adoption and discontinuance factors, theory and method. Findings. Immersive and spatial platforms consistently increase social presence, but presence does not translate reliably into better collaboration or well-being. The best-controlled experiment found collaboration comparable across physical, video and virtual settings, with higher cognitive load in immersive VR, and a week-long study found substantial well-being costs of working in VR. Motion data from headsets can identify individuals, raising new privacy concerns. At the organizational level, adoption is driven by culture, leadership, readiness and normative pressure, while implementation capacity determines whether adoption creates value. Discontinuance is widespread but barely studied. Originality. The paper applies an information systems typology of discontinuance to the enterprise metaverse, proposes an integrative framework linking adoption drivers, platform, employee experience, outcomes and organizational trajectory, and sets out four testable propositions and a Theory-Context-Characteristics-Methodology research agenda.