Untangling the relationship between work pressure and emotions in social media: a quantitative empirical study of construction industry

Purpose The booming social media attracts construction professionals (CPs) to express emotions caused by work pressure (WP) through online behaviors. Previous works focus on the analysis of WP and emotions but do not adequately consider how WP can be reflected through online emotions. Thus, this study aims to attempt to explore the quantitative relationship between online emotional intensity and WP. Design/methodology/approach This study developed a linguistic-sticker (LS) model to quantitatively evaluate the sentiment intensity of posts published on social media. Moreover, the authors designed two econometric models of ordinary least squares regression and negative binomial regression to test the hypothesis. Findings The research found that posts with stronger negative sentiment (or positive sentiment) indicate that CPs face higher (or lower) WP. Besides, there is a negative bias between the sentiment intensity of posts and the comment quantity. Practical implications The positive correlation between sentiment intensity of posts and WP has been confirmed, which indicates that construction managers should pay more attention to CPs' behavior on social media, and take a more direct way to analyze work-related online behavior (e.g. posting, commenting). The dynamic monitoring of emotion-related posts also provides a direct basis for the management team to learn about CP's pressure status and propose measures to reduce their negative emotions. Furthermore, the emotional posts published by CPs on social media provide a direct basis for team managers to obtain their psychological state. Originality/value The research contributes to incorporating CPs' emotions into the LS model and to providing information systems artifacts and new findings on the analysis of WP and online emotions.