Trapped as a Good Worker: The Influence of Coercive Acquaintance Advertising on Work Outcomes

This article examines the organization phenomenon of coercive acquaintance advertising, which is born of social media context and emerging in tourism and hospitality industry. Empirical results analyzing the multisource and time-lagged data collected from 358 travel agency employees provide general support for our hypotheses. Specifically, this article finds that the practice of coercive acquaintance advertising leads employees to suffer from interrole conflict arising from being a worker and “friend” simultaneously on their personal social media networks, which in turn can affect their job performance, job satisfaction, and turnover intention. In addition, such mediation process can be strengthened by the high-level of employee’s feedback sensitivity such that there is the moderated mediation mechanism in the relationships between coercive acquaintance advertising and employee work outcomes. The findings have theoretical and practical implications for researchers and practitioners