Towards contextualizing stressors in technostress research

Schellhammer Stefan, Haines Russell

Abstract
The literature on "technostress" posits that information and communication technology (ICT) contributes to feelings of strain by increasing the speed of work, having to adapt to technological change, and/or the poor usability features of the ICT. Most technostress research builds on surveys distributed across organizations. Thus, stressor-related questions cannot differentiate between how strain might be experienced in different roles assumed in the workplace. This paper aims to investigate, by means of an experiment, how different roles in a work arrangement affect the perception of strain. Our results show that the mere quantity of tasks does not serve as a good predictor of strain. We posit that the perception of strain and stressors is influenced by the context in which the tasks are embedded. These findings underline the need to investigate the ways in which ICT alters