Abstract
At a time where welfare at work seems to be a priority for managers and organizations, and where mobile technologies allow permanent access to business information, increasing the porosity of borders between private and professional life; this thesis questions the impact of mobile technologies on employees’ psychological health and more specifically about their well-being (effects of nomadic technologies on the border between private and professional life, interpersonal relations, etc.). To explore this issue, we mobilized the Resources Conservation Theory (Hobfoll, 1989), a motivational theory which is based on the variety of resources available to a person in order to maintain, or reach, a situation of well-being and balance. The sales teams of a large French group, which were fitted in 2012 with Mobile Technologies (MT) constitute our field of investigation. The literature review and the results of an exploratory qualitative analysis, conducted using a semi-structured interview, with 34 commercials and managers, lead us to submit a structural model of the influence of mobile technologies on well-being at work, combining organizational, individual, and technological variables. This model was tested via a survey at a national level. From the 850 questionnaires which were sent, 400 usable responses were studied. First, our empirical results lead us to identify five categories of mobile technologies use, both depending on the nature of the technological support and on the performed task. The five obtained variables, became the input variables, through the modeling stage realized by the structural equations method. The test of research hypotheses emphasizes the role of certain resources such as autonomy, the meaning of work, the usefulness of technologies or organizational social support, especially to cope with the invasion of technology into the private sphere and the pressure related to its use. Overall, our results suggest that, despite the changes brought by the arrival of MT, there is no duality regarding the direct or indirect effect of these technologies on the stress level or on the welfare at work. Few interviewees are adamant on purely negative or purely positive impact of mobile technologies about welfare at work. However, a large majority of commercial and interviewed managers considered that the arrival of mobile technologies has "somewhat" favored well-being at work, despite the increased workload and technological invasion that it induced. In the end, MT seem to constitute constrained resources. To conclude this work, the theoretical and managerial contributions are presented as well as future opportunities of research.