The Impact of Excessive WhatsApp Usage on Employee Job-Stress: The Case of Indonesian Employee

Social media platforms have grown in importance as a means of professional knowledge sharing or interpersonal communication. There are contradictory results in the literature about whether social media enhances workers’ performance or contributes to stress at work. The current study examines how WhatsApp use at work can predict information and communication overloads that may cause job-stress by modifying the stressor-strain-outcome (SSO) model. This study involved 219 Indonesian workers from a coal mining company whereas the data was analyzed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). The results indicate that while WhatsApp usage at work has significant impact on communication overload, it has no discernible effect on information overload. Furthermore, communication and information overload have a positive impact on job-stress. It’s interesting to note that excessive WhatsApp usage has no direct effect on workers’ job-stress, with the exception of information and communication overload.