Workaholism typically has detrimental effects on the physical and mental well-being of individuals in organizations. However, limited research has focused on the interpersonal influence of workaholism. In this study, we explored the impact of leader workaholism on employee performance. Drawing upon social learning theory and activation theory, we propose there exists an inverted U-shaped curvilinear relationship between leader workaholism and subordinate performance. More precisely, leader workaholism levels are associated with subordinate workload through social learning processes, and the moderate level of leader workaholism could optimally activate employees, allowing them to effectively utilize cognitive resources and enhancing work performance. Moreover, we further propose that Social-oriented Social Media Use (SoSM) could mitigate the negative effect of leader workaholism by enabling employees to gain resource and rely less on workaholic leaders as social models. Analysis results based on a multi-source survey data collected from 321 leader-subordinate paired samples support for the proposed model. Our study offers new insights to the understanding of the relationship between workaholic leader and employee performance in the information era and sheds light on how SoSM could mitigate undesirable work conditions.
