One tool to rule? – A field experimental longitudinal study on the costs and benefits of mobile device usage in public agencies

Publikation: Beiträge in ZeitschriftenZeitschriftenaufsätzeForschungbegutachtet

Authors

With the rising number of mobile technologies used in work- and private-life domains, opportunities, and challenges of mobile device usage in daily lives arise. Against this background, we strive to investigate how corporately provided mobile devices, i.e., tablets, affect work-life conflict and innovation behavior of public sector employees over time. We analyze employees in German public agencies due to their high intrinsic motivation goals alongside strict working schedules, regulations, and payments in contrast to the employees of the private sector. Our research pursues a sequential explorative multi-method approach of conducting a field experiment with qualitative and quantitative data. Twenty employees were divided into two equal groups: 1.) employees with tablets, 2.) employees without tablets. After analyzing the interviews and survey data using methods from grounded theory, we found that a) digital competences can create a bottleneck for employees' innovation behavior, b) corporately provided mobile devices (COPE) decrease employees work-life conflict despite increasing their workload, and c) COPE-IT can support innovation behavior of employees in public agencies, assisting them in keeping up their efficient work when work demands are high. All these effects can be mediated by the development of employee's ownership towards their COPE-IT.
OriginalspracheEnglisch
Aufsatznummer101836
ZeitschriftGovernment Information Quarterly
Jahrgang40
Ausgabenummer3
Anzahl der Seiten18
ISSN0740-624X
DOIs
PublikationsstatusErschienen - 01.06.2023

Bibliographische Notiz

Funding Information:
This work was supported by the district administration of Siegen-Wittgenstein, Siegen, Germany and has been partially funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation ) – Project-ID 416228727 – SFB 1410, the German Ministry of Culture and Science of the Land of North Rhine-Westphalia (reference number: 005–1706-0006), and the research initiative “Instant Teaming between Humans and Production Systems” co-financed by tax funds of the Saxony State Ministry of Science and Art (SMWK3–7304/35/3–2021/4819) on the basis of the budget passed by the deputies of the Saxony state parliament.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Authors

DOI