Technostress: negative effect on performance and possible mitigations

Abstract

We investigate the effect of conditions that create technostress, on technology-enabled innovation, technology-enabled performance and overall performance. We further look at the role of technology self-efficacy, organizational mechanisms that inhibit technostress and technology competence as possible mitigations to the effects of technostress creators. Our findings show a negative association between technostress creators and performance. We find that, while traditional effort-based mechanisms such as building technology competence reduce the impact of technostress creators on technology-enabled innovation and performance, more empowering mechanisms such as developing technology self-efficacy and information systems (IS) literacy enhancement and involvement in IS initiatives are required to counter the decrease in overall performance because of technostress creators. Noting that the professional sales context offers increasingly high expectations for technology-enabled performance in an inherently interpersonal-oriented and relationship-oriented environment with regard to overall performance, and high failure rates for IS acceptance/use, the study uses survey data collected from 237 institutional sales professionals.

Social Media Induced Technostress and its Impact on Internet Addiction: A Distraction-conflict Theory Perspective

“…Another study found that the brain scans of 17 subjects addicted to the Internet resembled those of cocaine addicts (Lin et al, 2012). In fact, Tarafdar et al (2015) surveyed 3,100 organizational employees and found that, of the employees who reported feeling stressed by technology at work, 46 percent exhibited medium to high addictive symptoms to the same technology that "stresses them out".…”

“…Following this line of reasoning, the strain, or the outcome of stress, is the susceptibility to Internet addiction. Thus, individuals who experience social media-induced technostress are likely to have addiction-like symptoms (Tarafdar et al, 2015).…”

“…In fact, research has cited information overload as one of the primary behaviors that psychologists look for in assessing Internet addiction (Widyanto & Griffiths, 2006). Tarafdar et al (2015) found that overload may be highly related to Internet addiction. Thus, such overload is likely to be associated with social media as a distraction, to increase stress levels, and, therefore, to influence addiction.…”

“…This study also melds the research streams of technostress and Internet addiction by theorizing and examining the relationship among social media, technostress, and Internet addiction. Although the IS community often places these research streams into an overall category of research regarding technology's "dark side" (Lee et al, 2014;Tarafdar et al, 2015), to our knowledge, no research has linked them in one model. Guided by DCT, our results underscore the importance of these variables' being viewed under one theory and examined in a single model.…”

“…While research has focused on outcomes of social media-induced technostress, such as terminating the use of Facebook (Maier et al, 2015), this stream has overlooked an important psychological consequence of stress; namely, addiction (Tice, Bratslavsky, & Baumeister, 2001). Research has linked addiction not only to technostress (Tarafdar, Pullins, & Ragu-Nathan, 2015) but also to elevated turnover intentions and reduced organizational commitment (Turel, Serenko, & Bontis, 2011).…”