An examination of work exhaustion in the mobile enterprise environment

As the use of smartphones for work purposes increases, the term of mobile enterprise is emerging and rapidly expanding. The mobile enterprise is defined as a work environment that enables employees to perform their tasks using mobile devices without the constraints of time and space. Mobile enterprise is changing employees' way of working and ultimately affects corporate cultures and business processes as well as working environments. However, mobile enterprise, which was originally adopted to promote organizational efficiency, can intensify employees' work exhaustion. The objective of this study is to provide a better understanding of the work exhaustion in mobile enterprise environment. To that end, inducers and inhibitors of work exhaustion are adopted from previous literature to establish a research model. Mobile enterprise-stressors and organizational supports were used as inducers and inhibitors of work exhaustion, respectively. Job satisfaction was used as a consequence of work exhaustion. In order to empirically test the suggested research model, a survey targeting employees in mobile enterprises was conducted. A total of 210 valid responses were used for path analysis using partial least square (PLS) technique. As expected, we found that while mobile enterprise-stressors (inducers) were positively related to work exhaustion, organizational support (inhibitors) was negatively related to work exhaustion in mobile enterprise environment. These associations were further analyzed at the sub-dimension levels of inducers and inhibitors in order to provide practical implications for minimizing work exhaustion under the mobile enterprise environment. The results revalidated the impacts of techno-stressors and organizational support on work exhaustion in mobile enterprise environment. Some important implications for research and practice as well as directions for future study are discussed.