Where does technostress collide?

The strain people feel from using information and communication technologies at work, together with the conditions of that technology use that produce it. Brod named it in his 1984 book Technostress as a modern trouble of adapting to computers. Ragu-Nathan, Tarafdar, Ragu-Nathan, and Tu turned it into a measured construct in 2008 by naming five technostress creators: techno-overload, when technology pushes people to work faster and longer; techno-invasion, when it reaches into private life; techno-complexity, when growing tools leave people feeling unskilled; techno-insecurity, the fear of losing one's job to those more skilled; and techno-uncertainty, the churn of constant upgrades. In their surveys these creators lowered job satisfaction and commitment, and Tarafdar and colleagues linked them to role stress and lower productivity. The referent is job stress with a named cause, the technology itself, gauged by self-report scales about that technology.[1][2][3]

Unit

A worker's strain caused by using information and communication technology

Recovery means

Ragu-Nathan and colleagues pair the creators with technostress inhibitors, such as technical support and user involvement, that lower the strain

Measured by

Self-report scales for the five technostress creators, with job satisfaction, commitment, and productivity as criteria

The broad psychological construct that technostress is a special case of. Lazarus and Folkman's 1984 Stress, Appraisal, and Coping defined stress not as an event but as a relationship between a person and a demand they judge to tax or exceed their resources, followed by efforts to cope. The job demands-resources model of Bakker and Demerouti carries the same idea into work: demands drain energy and lead to strain, while resources offset them and support motivation. Technostress applies this general model, with the technology supplying the demand, so it inherits the theory rather than replacing it. This site keeps a separate page for stress as the parent construct, and the same word also names unrelated things, from mechanical stress in a loaded material to the emphasis placed on a syllable in speech, which is the jingle that technostress carries. Adding techno- to a strain marks where a familiar process is set off, not a new theory of stress.[4][5]

Unit

A person's strain when demands are appraised as exceeding resources

Recovery means

In these models recovery comes from coping and from job resources that offset demands, not from anything peculiar to technology

Measured by

Appraisal and coping measures, or job demands and resources inventories, with strain and burnout as outcomes

A strand of information-systems research that ties features of technology to the stressors of the general stress literature and then to strain. Ayyagari, Grover, and Purvis surveyed working professionals in 2011 and linked technology characteristics, such as usefulness, intrusiveness, and pace of change, to established stressors of overload, invasion, and role ambiguity, and from there to strain. Their point was that the stressors are the ones occupational health already studies, and what technology changes is how strongly its features provoke them. Related work connects technostress to exhaustion, lower productivity, and the intention to leave a job or stop using a system. The value of this framing is that it asks a study to name the stressor and the strain, rather than attaching the label technostress to any discomfort with a device.[6]

Unit

The path from a technology's features to known stressors to strain

Recovery means

Not modelled directly; the framing points back to the same coping and resource processes as the general stress literature

Measured by

Survey scales for technology characteristics, stressors, and strain, tested in a structural model

A newer label for the strain of being expected to stay reachable and to answer messages quickly outside working hours. Barber and Santuzzi defined workplace telepressure in 2015 as a preoccupation with, and urge to respond fast to, work messages, and found it tied to poorer recovery, more burnout, and worse sleep. It overlaps heavily with the techno-invasion creator of technostress, but it comes from a separate research line with its own scale, so much the same experience travels under more than one name. This is the jangle at the centre of the page: technostress, technology-related strain, and workplace connectivity stress or telepressure are several names, from several fields, for strain brought on by information and communication technology. Before treating any of them as new, a study should check whether its items paraphrase one already in use.[7]

Unit

A worker's urge to answer work messages quickly, and the strain it brings

Recovery means

Studied through failure to recover; detaching from messages after hours is the proposed remedy

Measured by

A self-report telepressure scale, with recovery, burnout, and sleep as outcomes