The Double-Edged Sword Effect Of Work Connectivity Behavior At Work During Non-Working Time On Proactive Behavior

Thanks to the rapid development of communication and Internet technologies,we are entering an era of high interconnectedness.Employees are undergoing a fundamental change in their working patterns and in the integration of their work.More and more employees are handling their work during non-working hours and modern work is no longer confined to the traditional work sphere,which has become a common phenomenon.Most of the previous studies on the impact of out-of-hours work connectivity behavior have only been analyzed from a positive or negative perspective,lacking a dialectical view of this behavior,making it difficult for the current findings to provide a reasonable explanation of the actual management phenomenon.In addition,employees’ proactive behavior is an important factor influencing their innovative behavior and high performance,and companies expect their employees to generate more proactive behavior.And as out-of-hours work behavior may affect employees’ proactive behavior in both positive and negative ways,it is necessary to study in depth the mechanism of the effect of out-of-hours work handling on employees’ proactive behavior and its boundaries,which will help managers to better understand employees’ work behavior and motivation,and thus develop more effective work management strategies and arrangements.Using resource conservation theory and boundary theory as the core theoretical basis,by analyzing the data from 369 employees’ questionnaires,the test results showed that:(1)out-of-hours work connectivity behavior positively influences employees’ proactive behavior through job autonomy;at the same time,out-of-hours work connectivity behavior negatively influences employees’ proactive behavior through emotional exhaustion.(2)When individuals’ preference for boundary partitioning is high,out-ofhours work-linked behavior enhances the effect on emotional exhaustion.Conversely,when individual boundary partitioning preferences are low,non-work time workconnected behavior enhances the effect on job autonomy.(3)The mediating effect of boundary partitioning preference on job autonomy was negatively moderated and the mediating effect on emotional exhaustion was positively moderated.