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A Diary study of social media and performance in service sector: Transformational leadership as cross-level moderator

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Abstract

Social media (SM) use has a weak, negative association with performance and well-being in cross-sectional and longitudinal research, but this association in experience sampling studies has been rarely explored. Drawing from the Person-Environment Fit model, the present research expands the SM literature by analyzing day-level relationships among overloads; technostress, social media fatigue (SMF), and job performance. Furthermore, as a cross-level moderator transformational leadership (TL) was tested to undermine the impact of SMF on job performance. The authors collected daily data using the multi-source experience sampling process from two countries and for two independent studies. Multilevel analysis results showed (study 1) that overload predicted technostress and SMF; however, surprisingly technostress was not significantly related to performance. Similar findings in study 2 show the insignificant relationship between technostress and performance. Moreover, in both studies, cross-level interaction was also insignificant for this relationship. Furthermore, cross-level interaction between TL and SMF on objective performance was significant for study 2 but unexpectedly not significant for study 1. Implications and future research directions have been discussed.

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    Ali Nawaz Khan

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Moreover, this study includes only human participants therefore; informed consent was obtained from all individual participants. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were following the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Data for this study can be attained on the request from the corresponding author. All authors provide consent to possible publication of this manuscript.

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Khan, A.N. A Diary study of social media and performance in service sector: Transformational leadership as cross-level moderator. Curr Psychol 42, 10077–10091 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02310-5

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