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ICT as a weight tilting the scales toward “nomadic employees”: Implications for work-school interface experiences of working students

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Abstract

For working students, reconciling work and school lives is a major challenge. Emerging ubiquitous information and communication technologies (ICTs) further exacerbate this challenge, as a constant connection to work via ICTs blurring the boundaries between work and school domains. While the influence of ICTs on users’ work and personal lives has received considerable research attention, the lens has not focused on how ICTs usage affect working students. In this study, we theorized the process by which working students’ ICTs usage during school time affects their work-school interface experiences. We conducted a time-lagged design with two-phase data collection, and a sample consisted of 266 working students was used to test the proposed hypotheses and theoretical model. The results suggest that as the frequency of work-related ICTs usage during school time increases, working students will experience more work-school conflict; the elevated experience of work-school conflict in turn negatively affects working students’ work-school balance satisfaction. Furthermore, our results indicate that the negative effects of ICTs usage presented in this study are stronger (weaker) for those with high segmentation (integration) preference. These findings add to our understanding of the consequences of ICTs usage regarding working students’ work-school interface. We provide some recommendations on how to minimize work-school conflict caused by ICTs usage and enhance balance satisfaction, and provide directions for future research in this topic.

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Acknowledgements

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support from National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (No. 71871116, 72271122), Program of the 14th Five-Year Plan of Education Science in Jiangsu (No. D/2021/01/33), and Program of Graduate Education and Teaching Reform at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (No. 2021YJXGG24). The anonymous reviewers and the editors of this study are also acknowledged for their constructive comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Management Science and Engineering, College of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 211106, China

    Zhipeng Zhou & Ziyao Zhang

  2. Department of Construction and Real Estate, School of Civil Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, 211189, China

    Ying Lu

  3. Department of Business Administration, College of Economics and Management, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 211106, China

    Zilong Wang

  4. School of Engineering and Built Environment, Griffith University, Nathan, Brisbane, QLD, 4111, Australia

    Jianqiang Cui

  5. Institute of Project Management, School of Mechanics and Civil Engineering, Research Center for Digitalized Construction and Knowledge Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, 221116, China

    Guodong Ni

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Zhou, Z., Zhang, Z., Lu, Y. et al. ICT as a weight tilting the scales toward “nomadic employees”: Implications for work-school interface experiences of working students. Educ Inf Technol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-023-12416-x

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