The stress potential of social media in the workplace

Abstract

Social media have enriched the communication profession with new and immediate ways of stakeholder interaction. Along with new possibilities also come challenges – as professionals are engaging in real-time conversations with their audiences on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and the like, they have to learn to mentally cope with an oversupply of possibly relevant information, with an invasion of work matters into the private domain and with changing work contents and structures. This paper proposes a measurement routed in the technostress and overload research to assess these challenges brought to communication workforces by social media. These data were collected in a quantitative survey among 2,579 marketing and communication professionals. Based on an exploratory factor analysis, we demonstrate that being literate in an age of social media encompasses not only knowing how to retrieve and process information appropriately in various social settings, but also – and maybe more importantly – to mentally cope with overload, invasion and uncertainty.

Keywords:

• social media
• information overload
• stress
• coping
• scale development

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eliane Bucher

Eliane Bucher is a PhD candidate at the Institute for Media and Communications Management at the University of St. Gallen and at Harvard University's Berkman Center.

Christian Fieseler

Christian Fieseler is an Assistant Professor of media and communications management at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.

Anne Suphan

Anne Suphan is a PhD candidate at the University of St. Gallen. Coming from a background of quantitative research methods and media economics, she currently focuses her research on social media literacy and empirical media research.