Study On The Relationship Among Employees’ Emotions, Coping Strategies And Information Technology Use

Emotions play a central role in our lives and influence our beliefs and attitudes, guiding ourthinking, decision-making and behavior. Information has become important resources in modernbusiness, and the use of information technology is a necessary condition for enterprises to gaincompetitive advantage. The effective use of IT can improve organizations’ efficiency andperformance, but realized the effectiveness and value of IT ultimately depends on internalemployees’ use of IT. With the developing of the theory of modern enterprise management andwidespread concern about emotions, emotions rise to the equal importance with the knowledge,intelligence and professionalism. Emotions’ impact on the employees’ use of informationtechnology is extraordinarily important, but research is still in its infancy, this paper attempts tostudy around this core issue, hoping to supplement the deficiencies of the existing theoreticalresearch, and guide enterprises practices significantly.The purpose of this paper is to understand the mechanism of employee’s emotions impactthe use of information technology, and to provide guidance for the enterprise managementpractices, and to improve the success rate of IT deployment. Firstly, this paper integrates relatedtheory of social psychology and organizational behavior literature, thoroughly analyzes theinfluence of employees’ emotions on their use of information technology; secondly, focuses onthe basic research proposition of how employees’ emotions impact on their use of IT, we comesto preliminary assumptions through qualitative analysis of cases among enterprises; thirdly, wequantitative analyzes215sample data obtained through questionnaires, mainly used exploratoryfactor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), correlation analysis and structuralequation modeling to empirically verify the conceptual model and hypotheses. According to theresults of empirical study, there come to some important conclusions as following:(1) Anxiety and anger negatively related to the use of information technology, happinessand excitement positively related to the use of information technology. Positive, social supportand approaching coping strategies are positively related to the use of information technology.But distancing strategy is negatively related to the use of information technology.(2) Different emotions associated with different coping strategies. Excitement positivelyrelated to positive coping strategies and social support strategy; anxiety and anger both positively related to social support strategy and distancing strategy; happiness positively related toapproaching strategy.(3) The influence of happiness and excitement on IT use is indirect, and this influence isderived through the mediating role of coping strategies. The influence of anxiety and angerhas direct effect on IT use, meanwhile, through coping strategies anxiety and anger furtherinfluence IT use.