Impact of Technostress on End-User Satisfaction and Performance

Abstract

Organizational use of information and communications technologies (ICT) is increasingly resulting in negative cognitions in individuals, such as information overload and interruptions. Recent literature has encapsulated these cognitions in the concept of technostress, which is stress caused by an inability to cope with the demands of organizational computer usage. Given the critical role of the user in organizational information processing and accomplishing application-enabled workflows, understanding how these cognitions affect users' satisfaction with ICT and their performance in ICT-mediated tasks is an important step in appropriating benefits from current computing environments. The objective of this paper is to (1) understand the negative effects of technostress on the extent to which end users perceive the applications they use to be satisfactory and can utilize them to improve their performance at work and (2) identify mechanisms that can mitigate these effects. Specifically, we draw from the end-user computing and technostress literature to develop and validate a model that analyzes the effects of factors that create technostress on the individual's satisfaction with, and task performance using, ICT. The model also examines how user involvement in ICT development and support mechanisms for innovation can be used to weaken technostress-creating factors and their outcomes. The results, based on survey data analysis from 233 ICT users from two organizations, show that factors that create technostress reduce the satisfaction of individuals with the ICT they use and the extent to which they can utilize ICT for productivity and innovation in their tasks. Mechanisms that facilitate involvement of users, and encourage them to take risks, learn, explore new ideas, and experiment in the context of ICT use, diminish the factors that create technostress and increase satisfaction with the ICT they use. These mechanisms also have a positive effect on users' appropriation of ICT for productivity and innovation in their tasks. The paper contributes to emerging literature on negative outcomes of ICT use by (1) highlighting the influence of technostress on users' satisfaction and performance (i.e., productivity and innovation in ICT-mediated tasks) with ICT, (2) extending the literature on technostress, which has so far looked largely at the general behavioral and psychological domains, to include the domain of end-user computing, and (3) demonstrating the importance of user involvement and innovation support mechanisms in reducing technostress-creating conditions and their ICT use-related outcomes.