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In the context of the COVID-19 crisis, information technology (IT) was presented as a solution for staying in touch at a distance and continuing to work from remote locations (Carillo et al., 2021). In these ways, IT was expected to support collective resilience. In fact, the use of IT had been growing for some time. Maintaining and developing telework is, however, making us increasingly dependent on IT. Although work can be a pleasure, its support by these technologies may trivialize both addiction to work and addiction to IT devices like smartphones, especially when used as personal information systems (PIS) for work.
Smartphone addiction is already the subject of a vast amount of scientific literature. Smartphone use can lead to a behavioral addiction that proves problematic when it causes deleterious effects for its user (Gentina & Rowe, 2020). Although these negative consequences do not always result in severe physiological effects like other substance addictions (Panova & Carbonell, 2018), smartphone addiction can manifest itself in other symptoms or states (Yu & Sussmann, 2020). These may range from problematic compulsive use to severe addiction (Vaghefi et al., 2017; Vaghefi et al., 2022). Apart from the degree of dependency of the behavior, use becomes problematic insofar as it leads to increased risks of accidents (driving a vehicle), health risks (not wearing wired headphones, but a wireless earpiece or worse holding the smartphone up to one’s ear), or uncontrolled spending (Bianchi & Phillipps, 2005).
In the current study, problematic smartphone dependency (PSD) is characterized by compulsive-obsessive behavior accompanied by a loss of control in its use, conflicts with others or an inability to fulfill one’s obligations (Gentina & Rowe, 2020) . It is not a pathology. Thus, it is not an addiction in the psychiatric sense because it does not affect the body of the sufferer, is not stable over time, and can disappear quickly.
The literature on smartphone addiction and dependency has focused on young people because of the ease of constituting study samples from this population and their intense use of social networks (Gentina & Rowe, 2020). Unfortunately, there are few studies on adult populations, especially among workers. On the one hand, working adults may be protected from PSD by their activities at work. When focused on the tasks at hand, workers are distracted from compulsive use of their smartphones (whether compulsive use is linked to the phone as a “fetish” object or the multiple applications that offer an escape from the routine of daily life). On the other hand, the few studies on smartphone addiction among workers show that the perception of the benefits of smartphone use at work can turn into an addiction and, in turn, become counterproductive (Li & Lin, 2019).
The smartphone can be considered a Swiss army knife by ambitious and organized executives who aim to improve productivity. It allows them to handle e-mails and offers numerous applications for business (Barkhuus & Polichar, 2011). It can, thus, be tuned for work and serve as a personal information systems (PIS) (Baskerville, 2011). Adapted in this way, the smartphone makes it possible to follow one’s workflow at any time, in any place, and without the encumbrance of a laptop.
For people who are passionate about their work, smartphones and the development of a PIS are not without risks. If an individual has difficulties regulating their behaviors, working life can encroach on time devoted to private life. This will result in work-family conflicts (Qi et al., 2017). Moreover, it may turn work enjoyment into work addiction, fostering dependency on the smartphone itself. Luckily, some personality traits contribute to a better capacity for self-regulation. Dispositional mindfulness – the “receptive attention to and awareness of present events and experience” (Brown et al., 2007, p. 212) – has been found to be a positive trait-based variable that alleviates automatic or compulsive behaviors (Daniel et al., 2022a).