The good kind of bad stress: how social media stress and procrastination are associated with feelings of productivity in the Finnish working population.

Abstract

Employee productivity has clear given benefits. Productive employees usually translate to productive organizations. Organizations have multiple ways to maintain and enhance employee productivity. Usually, the most effective way is to maintain a positive employee well-being. Well-being and productivity are well intertwined, and in most circumstances, a healthy employee is also a productive employee. One of the ways of maintaining employee well-being is to mitigate unnecessary work-related stress.

Social media is increasingly utilized in organizations. It has the potential to enhance communication, streamline work-related tasks, and provide effective marketing. The potential of utilizing social media is well known. It is designed for humans, to make us more efficient. Another increasing topic regarding social media is its negative associations. These negative phenomena caused by the new technology are referred to as the dark side of the technology. One of the major themes of this dark side is technostress. Technostress originally referred to the difficulties in using new technology, but it has since expanded to other dimensions. The present thesis utilizes two technostress dimensions: techno-overload (too much) and techno-invasion (always connected). These two technostress dimensions are perceived to be caused by challenge stressors. Challenge stressors initiate stress than can be appraised as an obstacle to conquer. In these stressful situations, the potential gain overshadows the potential losses. Hence, challenge stressors could lead to beneficial outcomes in addition to the negative ones. Stress is usually coped with and the present study adds the perspective of procrastination. Procrastination has multiple different concepts, but they all include an element of putting off tasks or delaying them. Procrastination is conceptualized as a tendency to procrastinate and also, as a form of avoidance coping. Additional view of curvilinearity was included. Curvilinear model of stress and productivity states that low levels of stress lead to low levels of productivity. A moderate level of stress increases productivity and an excess amount of stress decreases productivity. Curvilinear models are heavily debated in current literature, but rarely do they involve the perspective of stressor types.

The present thesis hypothesizes that 1) social media stress is positively associated with the feelings of social media enabled productivity, 2) procrastination is negatively associated with social media productivity, 3) social media stress is curvilinearly associated with social media productivity (inverted U-shape) and 4) procrastination moderates the effect of social media stress on social media productivity.

The present study utilizes the data from social media at work in Finland survey. It was conducted as a part of a Finnish project: Social media and work engagement among young adults, funded by the Finnish Work Environment Fund. The sample consists of Finnish full-time employees who use social media for work purposes (n = 1136). Age ranged from 18-65 and 43% were females. Hierarchical OLS regression was used to provide answers to the hypotheses.

The results showed support for the positive relationship between social media stress and productivity. Procrastination had no significant effect on productivity. The curvilinear effect was supported, and no significant moderation effect was found. The present thesis offers knowledge on the less know side of good kind of bad stress, referring to challenge stressors that may have beneficial outcomes. The present thesis also participates in the ongoing debate about the curvilinear models of stress and performance. It is important to elaborate on stressor types in stress research since stress is a complex process that takes time to progress.