Conclusions

6.1. T

I

The present research main goal is to study the impact of FOMO, Past Increase in Network, Technostress and Addiction on individual performance and productivity. The testing model results highlighted the multi relationships that exist between Addiction, Past Increase in Network, Technostress, Work-Family Conflict and FOMO and the way these relationships contribute to individual performance. Therefore, it is important that companies start to align internally how will overcome this situation. So, according to all the results, this study contributes to understand that Addiction is impacted by FOMO and Past Increase in Network and, that consequently, addiction contributes to workers performance. Thus, it is important to understand that the paradigm of some of the literature references need to be researched after the pandemic situation since some of this research results were not aligned with the previous literature review. The way users are starting to deal with ICTs seems to be a little bit different than in the past and this topic needs to be furthermore investigated and analyzed in the future.

6.2. P

I

The present research goes further than theoretical implications. The results from this study can bring practical concerns to companies that may help to improve workers performance.

This study contributions are important to understand what companies need to do when implementing a new Information system technology to achieve the best outputs out of this. Furthermore, the results are crucial to understand the impact that these new technologies can have on the relation between work and personal life. In fact, the present study reveals that Addiction is the main important factor when implementing a new technology. The addiction pathologies have demonstrated to be the center of all the concerns when talking about investing in ICTs. Past increase in Network and FOMO are the two major constructs that contribute to the development of addiction on ICTs. This result can be explained by the fact that in today’s world, everyone is always connected and there is a crescent movement of not wanting to lose any type of information. This results in an always on generation that demonstrates to feel bad when are disconnected and missing what’s happening in their network connections. This phenomenon seems to have increased during and after covid-19 pandemic since everyone was forced to stay at home and the only way to communicate and keep in touch was by using ICTs.

27 Nevertheless, it is significant to take attention to this since it can cause a lot of negative impacts on the family environment. During and after pandemics, many workers have been focused on working and communicating from home, however they seem to find difficulties when trying to differentiate the time that should be dedicated to family and the one that should be dedicated to work. According to this, our research revealed that the addiction to ICTs contributes to Work-Family Conflict.

In fact, companies need to start thinking furthermore on how they should deal with this addiction phenomenon to ICTs. It is important to start evaluating the implementation of new technologies and balance them with the increase effort on workers daily work and time. With a lot of information that is contributing to not focus on each task, workers seem to be lost with information overload. So, it is crucial to start thinking about what information should be shared to each user and which meeting it is crucial to be part of. Starting to notify users to what is truly important can make them have time and discernment to organize their daily tasks without focusing and losing time with other irrelevant information. This can also contribute to reduce the addiction to ICTs. Users will only be notified to what is truly important and according to this they will not need to be always connected even in weekends trying to see what is happening in the world of their organization.

Another concept that in the past seems to be crucial when talking about Addiction is Technostress.

Nevertheless, before and during pandemic users were obligated to learn how to use the new technologies and to understand how they can bring better approaches from them. Since the questionnaire was performed after pandemic, the low results in the impact that Technostress can have on Addiction can be explained. According to this, nowadays workers are totally familiarized with the ICTs that are using and they tend to not face so many difficulties in terms of adaptation to it.

Nevertheless, the ones that still feel technostress tend to realize that this contributes to their Work-Life balance. So, it is important to identify in companies which are the workers that are still facing some difficulties with the using of technologies and try to provide them some training regarding their difficulties.

The overall result of Addiction behaviors can be measured by performance and productivity results, and its impacts on companies. According to the present study, Addiction contributes to Performance meaning that when the user is addicted to the technology, they tend to have a higher performance level. This is a crucial point in terms of analysis and that must be considered to future ICTs implementations. Companies need to start thinking about this output and balance the importance of implementing new ICTs in network areas. It’s crucial to balance the benefits and consequences of each ICT implementation and manage their use to reduce users’ addiction to it. In fact, the present study revealed that Productivity is not negatively impacted by addiction. This result was not the expected,

28 otherwise it was expected to see that the productivity reduces when the addiction to ICTs improves.

Nevertheless, it might be explained by the fact that users can produce the same as without addiction, however the quality of it can be lower than the expected. Companies need to focus on results and this addiction behaviors are starting to reduce the possible optimization of results.

Finally, there are a lot of studies that are focusing only in one of the studied constraints, nevertheless the importance of studying the macro constructs in a network / home environment seems to be crucial.

The present study proposed to study it and demonstrates that it is essential to focus on addiction behaviors to reduce the impacts of ICTs on workers life and work environment. According to this, companies need to start balancing the benefits of introducing a new ICT or continue using the actual existent ones to maximize the outputs of using ICTs. It is crucial to have motivated and happy workers to achieve all companies’ goals.

6.3. L

F

W

The present research has some limitations that should be considered for future studies. The first faced limitation was the sample size. The sample should be greater, and it is important to be improved in a future study accordance to Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). On the other hand, the cross-sectional study can be also considered a research limitation. Cross-sectional studies are not done over time so, it would be greater to perform a Longitudinal study.

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