An empirical study on email use, stress, and employee job satisfaction

Abstract

Technological advances continue to create efficiencies in all areas of our lives. One medium dominates above all other technological applications is electronic mail (email). As email functionality expands, so does the volume and differing responsibilities resulting in substantial increase in time and resources dedicated to email use and proposed causation of many unintended consequences. The immense volume of email has exploded, often crippling users and demanding an excessive quantity of time allocation necessary to read and respond, causing inefficiencies affecting job satisfaction resulting in decreasing performance and productivity. The year 2020 introduced COVID-19 into all aspects of our lives forcing a majority of the population to work remotely increasing our reliance on technology. Findings from business surveys suggest that email traffic is consuming an proportion of the working day which has been associated with over-monitoring, workflow disruption, work-life conflict and addition to email – all which in turn are associated with higher levels of work-related stress. Why did the revolutionary technological ability of email transform our feelings concerning it use from inspiration to an invasive essential necessity of our everyday workload? To respond to this question, we examine the effects of email volume on job satisfaction, moderated by stress, and propose a cost effective, efficient, pragmatic experiment to reduce email volume and bring greater realization to the need of controlling email volume resulting in greater job satisfaction.