The Impact of Social Media as Technostress Inhibitor on Employee Productivity

Abstract

The positive and negative sides of information technology and systems are of interest to the researchers across different domains. Technostress, being a negative and unintended consequence rendered by the use of various information systems, has recently obtained significant attention in the information systems (IS) literature. It has been demonstrated in various studies how technostress affects the overall organizational performance by increasing role stress and reducing employees' job satisfaction, productivity, and performance. We extend the existing literature on technostress by reasoning that certain information technologies (IT) and systems may induce technostress that can be inhibited by certain other IT and systems such as social media. Drawing on coping theory, we explain the role of social media as technostress inhibitor. We thus provide the research model depicting the moderating role of social media, in which, we posit that the negative impact of technostress creators on employee productivity can be mitigated by the use of social media. We also provide the potential implications of the study and outline the research methodology that will be taken up in the next stage of our present research.