The Consequences of Technostress for End Users in Organizations: Conceptual Development and Empirical Validation

The research reported in this paper studies the phenomenon of technostress, that is, stress experienced by end users of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), and examines its influence on their job satisfaction, commitment to the organization, and intention to stay. Drawing from the Transaction-Based Model of stress and prior research on the effects of ICTs on end users, we first conceptually build a nomological net for technostress to understand the influence of technostress on three variables relating to end users of ICTs: job satisfaction, and organizational and continuance commitment. Because there are no prior instruments to measure constructs related to technostress, we develop and empirically validate two second order constructs: technostress creators (i.e., factors that create stress from the use of ICTs) and technostress inhibitors (i.e., organizational mechanisms that reduce stress from the use of ICTs). We test our conceptual model using data from the responses of 608 end users of ICTs from multiple organizations to a survey questionnaire. Our results, based on structural equation modeling (SEM), show that technostress creators decrease job satisfaction, leading to decreased organizational and continuance commitment, while Technostress inhibitors increase job satisfaction and organizational and continuance commitment. We also find that age, gender, education, and computer confidence influence technostress. The implications of these results and future research directions are discussed.