MONITORING TECHNOLOGY IN YOUR LIFE: A WORK IN PROGRESS

Contemporary information technologies are pervasive in the workplace. While our IT-reliant lifestyle has had a dramatic impact on business productivity it has also caused technology-induced stress, termed technostress. When... [ view full abstract ]

Contemporary information technologies are pervasive in the workplace. While our IT-reliant lifestyle has had a dramatic impact on business productivity it has also caused technology-induced stress, termed technostress. When working properly, information technology streamlines work and improves efficiency of an organization. However, when information technology malfunctions, some workers can find themselves in complete disarray, technostressed, and unable to perform, while others find workarounds and still maintain performance. We know very little about how individual differences affect technostress. This study argues that being stressed is not always the same as feeling stressed, or an individual’s physiology does not necessarily correlate to his or her psychology when working on online tasks. More specifically, we believe that personality can cause individuals to over- or under-react to techno-stressful situations and thus at times cry wolf when complaining about the affect work has on their stress level. To do this, we seek to examine four personality characteristics that we believe explains the most variance in both stress and strain: locus of control, social desirability, fear of negative evaluation, and propensity to worry to see how they correlate with perceived stress, objective strain, and performance. The results provide insight into how personality differently affects stress, strain, and performance.