The impact of excessive social media use at work: a usage experience–stressor–strain perspective

Excessive use of personal social media has become prevalent in the work environment and has caused significant psychological and behavioural problems among employees. These problems call for in-depth study. In this paper, we develop a usage experience–stressor–strain model to examine the consequences of excessive social media usage behaviour of employees at work, revealing the effects of different excessive usage patterns (i.e. social, hedonic, and cognitive) on employees’ psychological state (i.e. emotional exhaustion) and behavioural outcome (i.e. job performance) through dimensions of social media overload (i.e. information, communication, and social). We empirically test the research model with a survey of 422 employees who use social media at work. Our analysis presents that excessive social use at work is the major predictor of dimensions of overload. Furthermore, in contrast to the single effect of communication overload on emotional exhaustion and social overload on job performance, information overload has a significant impact on both emotional exhaustion and job performance of employees. This study advances our understanding of the complex relationships between excessive usage patterns, overload, emotional exhaustion, and job performance.