We Are All in This Together, or Are We? Job Strain and Coping in the Context of an E-Healthcare System Implementation

ABSTRACT

Doctors and paraprofessionals operate in stressful environments that jeopardize their well-being and quality of care. E-healthcare systems have been promoted by government initiatives (e.g., HITECH act) to support healthcare services. Recent evidence suggests, however, that these systems contribute to job strain. Drawing on findings from a qualitative study and proximity and homophily theories, we integrate the healthcare context to develop and test a research model of friendship network ties among and between doctors and paraprofessionals as a coping mechanism for alleviating job strain. We test our model in a year-long field study in a hospital that implemented a new e-healthcare system, with two waves of data collected from 152 doctors and 731 paraprofessionals. Our findings move beyond the classical view of friendship as a conduit of coping by suggesting that the source of friendship network ties could reduce or aggravate strain as doctors and paraprofessionals continue to interact with the system over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Job strain
• job coping
• e-healthcare use
• friendship ties
• homophily theory
• proximity theory

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.2022.2127450

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. Social network data used for the analysis of this period were collected at the end of the fifth month. During the second month to the fifth month, the number of employees’ friendship ties was expected to change because the new system could trigger interactions that could create new connections.

^2. We estimated the effects for the periods T5 and T12 and found them to be consistent. Hence, the results were reported based on data pooled across these time periods.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tracy Ann Sykes

Tracy Ann Sykes ([email protected]) is an associate professor of Information Systems in the Sam M. Walton School of Business at the University of Arkansas. She has been a member of the faculty of the Research School of Business in the College of Business and Economics at The Australian National University and has worked as a science assistant at the National Science Foundation. Dr. Sykes’s research focuses on leveraging social network theory, methods, and analyses to understand technology-related phenomena. She also works in the contextual areas of organizational and societal diffusion of technologies in developing countries and in health IT. Her work has been published in leading journals, such as MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Production and Operations Management, and Journal of Applied Psychology.

Ruba Aljafari

Ruba Aljafari ([email protected]; corresponding author) is an assistant professor of Business Information Technology in the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech. She completed her Ph.D. in Information Systems at the Sam M. Walton College of Business, University of Arkansas. Dr. Aljafari’s research interests include ICT implementation in organizations, usability, and healthcare IT, with an emphasis on patient-centered e-health and analytics. Her work has been published in leading journals in information systems, healthcare, and human-computer interaction, such as MIS Quarterly, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, and the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies.