Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of excessive social media use on individual job performance and its exact mechanism. An extended stressor–strain–outcome research model is proposed to explain how excessive social media use at work influences individual job performance.Design/methodology/approach: The research model was empirically tested with an online survey study of 230 working professionals who use social media in organizations.Findings: The results revealed that excessive social media use was a determinant of three types of social media overload (i.e. information, communication and social overload). Information and communication overload were significant stressors that influence social media exhaustion, while social overload was not a significant predictor of exhaustion. Furthermore, social media exhaustion significantly reduces individual job performance.Originality/value: Theory-driven investigation of the effects of excessive social media use on individual job performance is still relatively scarce, underscoring the need for theoretically-based research of excessive social media use at work. This paper enriches social media research by presenting an extended stressor–strain–outcome model to explore the exact mechanism of excessive use of social media at work, and identifying three components of social media-related overload, including information, communication and social overload. It is an initial attempt to systematically validate the casual relationships among excessive usage experience, overload, exhaustion and individual job performance based on the transactional theory of stress and coping.

Social media has deeply penetrated into university students' daily lives, inducing excessive usage that can result in social media overload. However, only few studies have explored the adverse consequences of social media use from a pedagogical perspective. This paper aims to investigate the effects of overload on students' academic performance and the underlying mechanism. Based on the stressor-strain-outcome model, we propose that information, communication, and social overloads influence technostress and exhaustion of students, which in turn impair their academic performance. Results from a study of 249 Chinese social media users in universities reveal that all three types of overload enhance technostress, but only information overload significantly affect exhaustion. Both technostress and exhaustion have negative effects on academic performance. This study enriches social media literature by identifying a more comprehensive classification of social media-related overload among university students and investigating the exact mechanism of excessive social media use in educational environment.