Employees’ emotional reactions to digitally enabled work events

Digital technologies are a ubiquitous presence in our lives. Employees can experience a constant bombardment of digital messages, leading to challenges such as work overload, feelings of uncertainty, invasion, and burnout. Employees and organisational leaders are faced with multiple decisions everyday in technology-pervasive environments. Even in the early 1980’s it was recognised that decision-making environments, and the technology within these environments, were having a large impact on decisions and how they are made. This paper presents a scoping review exploring current research on emotional reactions of employees to digitally enabled work events. Utilising Affective Events Theory as a lens, we uncover specific factors such as Emotional Dissonance, Support & Connectedness, Task-Technology Fit, Outcome Beliefs, Personality-Technology Fit, Motivators, and Work Environment Changes. These all play an important part in shaping emotional reactions of employees using digital technologies. The effectiveness of digital technology usage both affects, and is affected by, employees’ emotions.