Toward an understanding of work stress in IT professionals: Boundary spanning, emotional labor, and burnout

Burnout of information technology (IT) professionals has been a topic of interest to both academics and industry in recent years; stressors such as excessive workload, relentless deadlines, role conflict and role ambiguity have all been implicated in the exhaustion of IT professionals. Yet, researchers have paid little attention to the influence of affective and interpersonal components of the job. The purpose of this research, presented in the form of three essays, is to explore the effect of those influences on work exhaustion in IT professionals.;The first essay investigates the effects of boundary spanning activities on IT professionals. Previous boundary spanning research has offered conflicting results, identifying both positive and negative outcomes for IT professionals. This study employs a mixed methodology incorporating interviews and a field study to explore possible explanations for prior inconsistent findings. Findings indicate that IT professionals engage in different kinds of boundary spanning activities (external representation, negotiation, information processing, and training) and that they work across different kinds of boundaries (organizational, departmental, and IT job type). Political skill, an individual difference variable, moderates the relationship between some of these boundary spanning activities and outcome variables (role ambiguity and work exhaustion).;The second and third essays focus on emotional aspects of IT professionals' work lives. Essay 2 examines emotional dissonance within the context of an established model of IT professional work exhaustion. Survey findings indicate that emotional dissonance predicts work exhaustion even when controlling for traditional work stressors such as perceived workload, role ambiguity, and role conflict. Essay 3 expands the nomological net from the construct of emotional dissonance into other emotional labor concepts and incorporates conflict management strategies into the model. This phase of the project examines the interplay of emotional display expectations and way in which IT professionals manage conflict situations. Survey results indicate the type of emotion regulation impacts work exhaustion; surface acting shows a strong, positive association with work exhaustion while deep acting shows no such relationship. Antecedents to deep acting and surface acting are also explored. Expectations to suppress negative emotional display and the use of an asserting conflict management style encourage surface acting, while expectations to display positive emotions and the use of integrative conflict management styles encourage deep acting. As a whole, these three interrelated essays expand the understanding of burnout in IT professionals by looking beyond traditional work activities and exploring those job requirements which demand that IT professionals work well with colleagues and customers.