Social Media Use as a Contributor to Marginalization in India: A Five-Year Field Study in the US and India

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a global shift to technology driven remote work, intensifying the blurring of work-life boundaries. This study investigates the differential impact on employee well-being in developed versus emerging economies. Using a five-year longitudinal study with data collected pre-COVID-19 (2019), during-COVID-19 (2020), and three years of post-COVID-19 (2021, 2022, 2023) in a single firm’s US and India offices, we examine job outcomes through the lens of the job characteristics model. Our findings reveal a stark divergence in post-pandemic recovery. While US employees’ job strain and job satisfaction returned to pre-pandemic levels, their Indian counterparts experienced sustained job strain and reduced job satisfaction recovery. These persistent negative outcomes demonstrate that the impact of using technologies in India has led to them being more marginalized driven by the new realities of technology-dependent work. That Indian workers experience significantly higher job strain, which has not returned to pre-COVID levels, represents a grave concern. This serves as an urgent call for scientific and managerial attention to the problem of emergent marginalization due to increased social media and other technology use.