Research on the Influencing Factors and Mechanism of Smartphone Use and Addiction on Employees: A Systematic Review

Abstract

In recent decades, new technologies have reshaped people's working environment. Both organizations and individuals have benefited a lot from these new technologies. However, everything is two-sided, which means the development of various new technologies in the work scene, such as smartphones, has had a series of negative effects on employees' job performance and their physical and mental health. Researchers generally regard smartphone addiction in the work scene as a behavioral addiction in a specific environment. The formation of employees' smartphone addiction is affected by many factors, in which psychological factors belonging to endogenous factors and working environment factors belonging to exogenous factors are significant. Besides, in the past three years, the outbreak and popularity of COVID-19 accelerates formation of employees' smartphone addiction. The influence of smartphones addiction on employees had advantages and disadvantages while it is generally believed that the disadvantages, which have numerous negative effects on employees' physical and psychological health, personal life, family and job performance, outweigh the advantages. The mechanism of psychological smartphone addiction can be explained by job demand–resource theory and boundary theory. In the future, we still need to pay attention to the influencing mechanism of smartphone addiction and employees' job performance and figure out the key influencing factors, so as to amplify the advantages of using smartphones in the work scene and make smartphone serve to the target of improving job performance.