Technostress and the hierarchical levels of personality: a two-wave study with multiple data samples

ABSTRACT

Even though IS use has numerous benefits for users and organisations, such as improved user performance and greater productivity, an increasing number of users experience technostress. Since technostress can result in decreased user well-being, it is important to understand what leads users to perceive it. Recent technostress research points to the relationship between personality traits and the perception of technostress as a research gap. Given that personality traits are structured hierarchically, we study how and which levels of user personality influence the perception of technostress. In developing our research model, we select personality traits from the three hierarchical levels of personality: neuroticism, personal innovativeness in IT (PIIT), and IT mindfulness. The results of 2 two-wave studies analysing data collected in an organisational setting (sample 1) and through mTurk (sample 2) reveal that all three personality traits influence the perception of technostress, with IT mindfulness having the strongest impact. This study contributes by revealing that user personality and, primarily, IT mindfulness influence the perception of technostress. Additionally, our findings reveal an inverted u-curved influence of techno-stressors on user performance, deepening our understanding of how the perception of technostress influences user reactions.

ACCEPTING EDITOR:

• Dov Te’eni

ASSOCIATE EDITOR:

• Jason Thatcher

KEYWORDS:

• Technostress
• user personality
• IT mindfulness
• personal innovativeness in IT
• neuroticism
• replication study

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We acknowledge that there are further studies beyond the references listed in the figure which study related issues but are not directly related to the focus of our study and therefore not displayed in this figure. For example, other studies focus on additional techno-stressors, such as interruptions (Galluch et al., 2015; Tams et al., 2018), system breakdowns (Riedl et al., 2012), or context-specific stressors (Maier et al. 2015c). In addition, there are other studies that examine further individual differences, such as age (Tams et al., 2018), gender (Riedl et al., 2013), and experience (Eckhardt, Maier, and Büttner, 2012) or other issues such as organisational contexts (Wang et al., 2008).

2. The first value refers to sample 1 and the second value to sample 2.

3. Due to an insufficient number of individuals in our samples, we disregarded the group named traditionals, which would include individuals born before 1955.