Techno-overload and well-being of French small business owners: identifying the flipside of digital technologies

ABSTRACT

Technostress is an important by-product of information and communication technologies (ICT). The technostress literature suggests focusing on specific dimensions of technostress, such as techno-overload, which describes when ICT usage demands to work faster and longer. However, only a few studies have dealt with the technostress of small business owners, let alone techno-overload. This is surprising since work overload in general has been identified as an important dimension of job stress for small business owners, and technostress has been identified as an important impediment for workers in general. The aim of the current study is to investigate the effect of techno-overload on well-being outcomes (as a composite measure consisting of physical well-being, mental well-being, sleep quality, burnout, and loneliness) using three data sets of French small business owners. Our results indicate a strong negative correlation between techno-overload and our composite measure of well-being for all three data sets. We interpret our findings for several different disciplines: information systems, small business owners and entrepreneurship, health and well-being, psychology and organization studies. Our data also allow for the identification of contextual effects – the COVID-19 pandemic – since one survey was conducted before, one at the start of, and one during the pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Techno-overload
• technostress
• small business owners
• entrepreneurs
• well-being outcomes
• COVID-19 pandemic
• France

Acknowledgements

The present research was supported by LabEx Entreprendre, University of Montpellier (ANR-10-Labex-11-01, Agence Nationale de la Recherche), by Observatoire Amarok and by the Research Excellence Initiative (REI 2015) of Erasmus University Rotterdam. The authors would like to thank the Confédération des PME (CPME), Groupe VYV and Garance Mutuelle for their collaborations in setting up the two surveys: Enquête CPME 2019 and Enquête Garance 2020. During the 2020 lockdown, the Chambers of Commerce and Industry (CCI) of the departments of Côte d’Or, Hérault, Morbihan, Saône and Loire, Pyrénées Orientales and the Chamber of Commerce and Handicraft (CMA) of the department of Vendée participated in setting up the Enquête Nationale COVID-19 2020.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Document

Techno overload SME France V60.docx

Data sources

available at https://osf.io/7aqt4/

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08985626.2023.2165713

Notes

1. Access to and use of ICT has been growing relentlessly since the start of the 21st century (Feng 2021). In 2021, 63% of the worldwide population had access to the internet and 95% had access to a mobile broadband network (ITU 2021).

2. The terms ‘information and communication technologies’ and ‘digital technologies’ are used as synonyms both in the entrepreneurship literature (Autio et al. 2018, 8) as well as in the information systems literature (Fischer, Reuter, and Riedl 2021, 2). We use the term ICT because it is largely used in the literature on technostress even when authors talk about digital technologies.

3. We use the term techno-overload as a synonym for technology overload in the remainder of the current paper.

4. RED refers to resources-experiences-demand model and TIC refers to Tecnologias de la informacion y comunicacion (Salanova, Llorens, and Cifre 2013).

5. We consider health and well-being as a continuum as Stephan (2018) did with mental health and well-being in her review and based on the definition of health of the World Health Organization.

6. An exception may be a recent study on the link between technostress and small business owners’ burnout. This study showed that technostress was positively associated with strain (emotional exhaustion) but not with burnout (Benzari et al. 2022). It may be that results depend largely on the inclusion of ‘negative affectivity’ as a control.

7. The variables and measures used in the three surveys are perceived measures mostly.

8. To investigate whether individual characteristics moderate the effect of techno-overload on well-being, we perform a range of further analysis in which we interact techno-overload with individual characteristics (i.e. whether the individual is a lone founder, age, gender (female), and necessity (dummy). The results are displayed in Table SM3 (Supplementary Material). The moderation effects are insignificant.

9. Studying various contexts enhances our understanding of the phenomena by delineating boundaries and ‘recognizing contingencies that influences relationships within a given context’ (Zahra 2007, 444).