Flextime or Responsibility? Perspectives from ICT Professionals' Emotional Labor and Congruence of Work Hour

• Main Authors: Jia-Ci Chen, 陳佳琪
• Other Authors: Chih-Ching Chiang
• Format: Others
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/sb5mdq

碩士 === 國立東華大學 === 資訊管理碩士學位學程 === 102 === The advancement of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) not only helps businesses to perform jobs easier but also change the ways to acquire information and interpersonal communication. As a result, ICT professionals need to learn ICT related skills continuingly and fulfill requirements of their departments and customers, and often increase technostress and social stress when they encounter discrepancies between their job demands and cognition. However, ICT professionals always hide their emotions to be fulfilled and satisfied the requirements of customers, leading to high emotional labor, especially in the surface acting. Adjustment of work hour is often used by businesses to cope with the job stress. However, considerations from employees’ expectation will be the key to success of work-hour adjustment, and therefore the congruence of work hour is proposed. The moderating roles are often used to consider the impact of emotions pertinent variables on stress in past research; however, it’s rarely to discuss the mediating roles of emotional related variables. Therefore, this study tries to integrate both the emotion and stress theories by regarding surface acting as the mediator to bridge the gap in literature. More specifically, our study focuses on ICT professionals and tries to explores the relationships between role stressor, autonomy, surface acting, technostress, and social stress, especially in the mediation effects of surface acting between stressors and stress, and the congruence of work hour is used as the moderator for the relationships where surface acting impacts on technostress and social stress. Data collected from 154 ICT professionals, moreover, PLS (Partial Least Squares, PLS) and hierarchical regression analysis were employed to validate the model and hypotheses. Results of this study indicate that the role stressors for ICT professionals, especially in the role conflict, role overload, are increasing the impact of emotional labor- surface acting, whereas autonomy is the negative influence. Second, ICT professionals’ surface acting has a positive significant effect on their social stress. Finally, the congruence of work hour moderates the relationship between surface acting and technostress. Implications and contributions are also discussed. Keywords: Technostress, Social Stress, Emotional Labor, Surface Acting, Congruence of Work Hour, Role Stressor, Autonomy