Institute of Transportation, MOTC

       In very competitive global markets, mobile telecommunications companies face increasing threats from over the top (OTT) services such as LINE, Spotify, and Netflix, thus decreasing traditional voice and messaging services and creating congestion in mobile data traffic. New, more profitable business strategies are desperately needed by telecommunications companies to avoid becoming “the dump pipes of OTT services.” This study extends the main stream of research on this topic by investigating the impact of job characteristics on employee attitudes and behavior. Job demands, job resources, job burnout, job engagement, emotion regulation, and job performance are considered in the model, and the extent of their causal relationship are tested. In particular, an investigation was conducted to examine the degree to which job characteristics, employee attitudes and behavior, and emotion regulation vary with respondents’ demographic characteristics. Further, the mediating role of emotion regulation on the relationships between job characteristics and employee attitudes and behavior is examined. A total of 252 valid respondents were collected by distributing questionnaires to the employees of mobile telecommunications companies in Taiwan.
In the results, it was found that job demands positively influenced job burnout; job resources positively influenced job engagement and emotion regulation; job engagement positively influenced job performance; and emotion regulation positively influenced job engagement and job performance but negatively influenced job burnout. However, job demands positively influenced emotion regulation, unlike the hypothesized negative linkage. A comparison of the standardized path coefficients revealed that job resources had the strongest impact on job performance, followed by emotion regulation and job demands. Emotion regulation fully mediated the relationship between job demands and job performance and partially mediated both the relationship between job resources and job performance. Further, the ANOVA results revealed that the job demands, job resources, job burnout, job engagement, emotion regulation, and the job performance levels of the respondents varied significantly with their demographic characteristics. Finally, managerial suggestions were provided for the mobile telecommunications industry that may possibly enhance employees’ job performance and their emotion regulation.