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The new digital age introduces new challenges for employees, because, through the increased use of technology, work is becoming more complex and cognitively demanding (Tarafdar, DArcy, Turel, & Gupta, 2015). One important challenge for employees is technological insecurity, which Tarafdar, Tu, Ragu-Nathan, and Ragu-Nathan (2007) defined as “a situation in which individuals feel threatened about losing their jobs as a result of new information technology replacing them, or of other individuals who have a better understanding of information technology” (p. 315). Earlier work examining technological insecurity showed negative effects on employee innovation (Chandra, Shirish, & Srivastava, 2019), employee engagement (Srivastava, Chandra, & Shirish, 2015), and employee retention (Maier, Laumer, & Eckhardt, 2015).
Although these and other previous studies have been valuable in helping to establish an initial association between technological insecurity and individual work outcomes, they are limited because they overlook a theoretical explanatory mechanism. By drawing on the stressor-strain model (Jex, Bliese, Buzzell, & Primeau, 2001), one purpose of this study was to extend previous research on the association between technological insecurity and individual performance by examining the mediating role of emotional exhaustion. Emotional exhaustion refers to a chronic state of physical and emotional depletion (Maslach, Schaufeli, & Leiter, 2001). While scholars have a strong understanding of the consequences of technological insecurity (for a meta-analytical review, see La Torre, Esposito, Sciarra, & Chiappetta, 2019), much less is known about the psychological mechanism linking technological insecurity to individual performance. It is important to study the processes underlying the association between technological insecurity and individual performance, because it provides direction as to how to reduce the negative consequences of technological insecurity at the workplace.
Despite recent calls for future research on potential contextual factors moderating the consequences of technological stressors (Ragu-Nathan, Tarafdar, Ragu-Nathan, & Tu, 2008; Srivastava et al., 2015), surprisingly little is known about these contextual factors. Specifically, social and interpersonal resources have been suggested as contextual factors that might moderate the association between technological insecurity and individual performance outcomes; yet, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this idea has never been empirically tested (Tarafdar, Cooper, & Stich, 2019). Particularly important social and interpersonal resources might be provided by leaders. Whereas leadership refers to a process whereby an individual influences (a group of) individuals to achieve a common goal, those who exercise leadership are referred to as leaders (Yukl, 2013). Contemporary positive leadership theories, such as transformational, servant, or authentic leadership theories, focus on a leadership approach that inspires individuals to rise above themselves (Koh, Lee, & Joshi, 2019). Although these leadership theories have their practical appeal in management, they might be based on an idealized ideology only limitedly offering a qualified understanding of organizational life (Alvesson & Einola, 2019). On the contrary, the leader–member exchange (LMX) theory is a specific type of leadership suggesting that the quality of exchanges between leaders and followers plays a central role in organizational life (Martin, Guillaume, Thomas, Lee, & Epitropaki, 2016). Indeed, the LMX perspective argues that employees who experience high quality relationships with their leader might have access to additional instrumental and expressive resources (Goodwin, Bowler, & Whittington, 2009; Martin et al., 2016; Sparrowe & Liden, 1997). As such, the authors propose that individuals who have access to high quality LMX might be able to cope with the negative consequences associated with technological insecurity. In this study, the authors tested the hypotheses through a conditional indirect modeling approach.