Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: The increasing use of information technology (IT) has a pervasive impact on society, including the world of work and its boundaries. Individual professionals, and knowledge workers in particular, are exposed to digital devices during the bulk of their working hours (Orlikowski and Scott 2016 ). In addition, persuasively designed social media and digital entertainment applications occupy the leisure time of an unprecedented number of people. A recent study revealed that 33.1 million Germans use the Internet “multiple times a day” , and 11 million even state to use it “constantly, almost the whole time” (Statista 2020 ). Scholarship clearly suggests that this compounded screen time can entail severe consequences to the wellbeing of individuals (Pflügner et al. 2020a ). In fact, using IT can lead to technostress, which is defined as “ any negative impact on attitudes, thoughts, behaviors, or body physiology that is caused either directly or indirectly by technology ” (Weil and Rosen 1997, p. 5). Technostress constitutes a pressing social issue, especially with regards to changes in work-life boundaries, potentiated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Thomas et al. 2020 ). According to a study conducted in 2019, 86 percent of participants claimed that the inability to switch off devices after regular working hours has a negative effect on employee wellbeing (Stewart 2020 ). The result is a personal feeling of being overwhelmed by communication content and interpersonal online connections, which negatively affects work and private life alike (Gui and Büchi 2019 ).
Authors: Milad Mirbabaie, Stefan Stieglitz, Julian Marx
Institutions: Paderborn University, University of Duisburg-Essen
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,390
Funder: Universität Paderborn
OpenAlex ID: W4213317846