Please Do Not Respond Asap: Impact of Workplace Telepressure on Employees’ Innovative Behavior in the Digital Era

Abstract This study investigates how workplace telepressure—the urge and preoccupation to respond quickly to work-related messages via ICT—affects R&D employees’ innovative behavior. While telepressure is widely recognized as a response to job demand under the Job Demands–Resources (JD-R) model, prior research often leaves vague what kind of internal resources it consumes. This study addresses that gap by integrating Processing Efficiency Theory (PET) to specify cognitive failure as the key mediating mechanism. We propose that telepressure undermines innovative behavior not through direct suppression, but by increasing employees’ cognitive failure, thereby impairing both idea generation and implementation.Survey data collected from Chinese R&D professionals were analyzed using Partial Least Squares- Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Results show that workplace telepressure does not exert a significant direct effect on innovative behavior but has a pronounced indirect effect through cognitive failure. Moreover, this negative pathway is significantly stronger for innovative idea generation than for implementation, indicating greater vulnerability of early-stage innovation to cognitive disruption. Perceived coworker support emerged as a valuable job resource, attenuating the impact of telepressure on cognitive failure and thereby weakening its downstream negative impact on both innovative idea generation and implementation. To enrich the analysis, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) modeling was employed to capture potential nonlinearities and assess predictor importance. Sensitivity analysis confirmed that cognitive failure was the most influential predictor of both innovative behavior outcomes.These findings deepen our theoretical understanding of how responding to job demands in the digital era erodes innovative behavior by targeting specific cognitive resources, and demonstrate the methodological value of combining SEM and ANN in organizational behavior research.