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Top1. Introduction
Adopting new ICT in organizations has become indispensable. The 21st century has experienced significant advances concerning Information and Communications Technology (ICT). This has, in turn, a profound effect on the day-to-day activities/work and the lives of employees. As indicated by Raišienė and Jonušauskas (2013), companies have also benefited from advances in ICT as they experience great advances in production and their effectiveness of their employees. However, according to Brillhart (2004), valuable as these advancements are, they have brought some challenges, such as stress and health problems. ICT is a double-edged sword (Lei and Ngai, 2014); it results in increased communication by using collaborative technologies such as instant messaging and voicemails, boosts productivity in organizations, and facilitates access to information for decision-making (Riedl, 2013). At the same time, it has a dark side, which may result in negative outcomes (Tarafdar et al., 2011; Zheng and Lee, 2016). ICT may make the employees feel compulsive about being connected all the time, forced to respond to work-related information in time, and resigned about frequent upgrades, which cause stress, job dissatisfaction and health-related problems (Tarafdar et al., 2010; Çikrıkci, 2016). This can lead to a type of stress known as “Technostress”.
Fuglseth and Sørebø (2014) define the negative psychophysical effects brought about by the use of ICT as “technostress”. Similarly, Ragu-Nathan et al. (2008), indicate that “Technostress”, a term invented by Brod, a clinical psychologist, in 1984, refers to the inability to cope or deal with ICT in a healthy manner. Ragu-Nathan et al., (2008) go on to say that “Technostress” is a term used to represent the negative effects that technology can cause to a person's psychological state; for example, loss of concentration, inability to sleep, headache, and many other symptoms. Technostress, therefore, is one of the fallouts of an end user’s attempts to deal with ICT and the changing cognitive and social obligations related to their use. As outlined by Tarafdar et al., (2010), technostress effects have appeared more over the past few years with the rapid expansion of ICT in the workplace.
Even though the topic of stress has been studied, research on technostress has been very little. Tarafdar et al., (2010) and Ragu-Nathan et al., (2008) conducted studies on this subject to isolate the essence of technostress and illustrate its effects. In relation to their studies, they claim that people suffering from technostress have a lower job fulfillment level and output, and are less committed to their companies. Although such researchers expose the essence of technostress, they do not clearly illustrate the specific technological characteristics that lead to such stress. It is such conceptualization that basically envelops the concept of technostress, making the relationship and boundaries between stress and technological characteristics unclear. For instance, techno-overload is among the aspects used to capture technostress. This aspect emphasizes that technology brings a heavier workload (Tarafdar et al., 2010).
Understanding the impact of technostress on employee satisfaction, commitment, and perceived performance is an important step towards benefiting from an advanced computing environment. Previous research on technostress (e.g., Lei and Ngai, 2014) shows that there is a negative relationship between technostress and employees’ satisfaction and performance. Tarafdar et al., (2007) show that there is an inverse relationship between technostress and productivity. In addition, Tarafdar et al., (2011) show that technostress significantly reduces job satisfaction, commitment, innovation, and productivity. Employees continually have to increase their daily interaction with ICTs, which may increase the negative effect of ICT use on them and enable people to be connected anytime and anywhere (Wang et al., 2008).