Lost in the Feed: The Role of Virtuous Leadership in Mitigating the Adverse Effects of Social Media Addiction and Procrastination on Turnover Intention

Despite the practical evidence on the dark side of social media, extant research sheds little light on the relationship between social media addiction and turnover intention. To address this gap, drawing from conservation of resource theory (COR), the current study investigates how employees’ social media addiction at the workplace fosters turnover intention via procrastination and how virtuous leadership can mitigate the adverse effects of social media addiction and procrastination. It administers a cross-sectional survey to software developers in software development companies based in Lahore, Pakistan. The data was analyzed using ordinary least squares (OLS) regression-based PROCESS macro. The results indicate that procrastination mediates the relationship between social media addiction and turnover intention. Moreover, virtuous leadership mitigates the adverse effects of procrastination on turnover intention. To a lesser extent and not conclusively, it can alleviate the adverse downstream impact of social media addiction on procrastination and turnover intention. This way, the current study shows that organizations can retain employees by encouraging virtuous leadership, which ameliorates the adverse effects of social media addiction and procrastination.