Technology Anxiety and Marketing Student Outcomes: The Mediating Role of Self-Concept and the Moderating Role of Teacher Anxiety

As marketing curricula become increasingly technology intensive, instructors and students alike face growing challenges in sustaining effective learning and positive classroom experiences. This study examines how technology anxiety influences marketing students’ academic anxiety and academic performance, and how perceived teacher anxiety shapes this process within technology-oriented classrooms. Grounded in self-construal theory, we conceptualize students’ self-concept as comprising independent and interdependent dimensions, and propose that technology anxiety undermines these self-concept resources, thereby affecting learning-related anxiety and performance outcomes. Integrating emotional contagion theory, we further suggest that perceived teacher anxiety conditions this pathway by shaping the classroom emotional climate. Using survey data combined with students’ final course grades from a technology-intensive marketing course, this study analyzes responses from undergraduate marketing students in China (N = 259). The analysis supports a moderated mediation model in which self-concept functions as a central psychological mechanism linking technology anxiety to academic anxiety, while only the independent dimension shows a robust association with academic performance, and perceived teacher anxiety strengthens the indirect effect, particularly through the interdependent dimension. These findings highlight how instructors’ emotional presence, alongside curriculum design, shapes both learning effectiveness and student well-being in contemporary marketing education.