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

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.