Do Technostress Creators Influence Employee Innovation?

Despite the spurt of active research in the field of technostress, two research gaps are particularly noteworthy. First, though past studies have described ‘technostress creators’ through five dimensions which include techno-overload, techno-invasion, techno-complexity, techno-insecurity and technouncertainty, the individual impact of each dimension of technostress creators on job outcomes has not yet received enough attention. Most research conceptualizes ‘technostress creators’ through an aggregated single construct comprising the above mentioned five dimensions. Second, though the past research on stress and coping suggests an inverted U-shaped relationship between stress and job outcomes as demonstrated through the Yerkes-Dodson Law, this relationship has not been examined for the technostress context. In this research-in-progress paper, using Transactional Model of Stress and Coping (TMSC) as the guiding theoretical framework we first theorize the linear and quadratic relationships of individual technostress creators with employee innovation performance. Next, we intend to test the theorized relationships via a field survey of senior organizational employees who regularly use information and communication technologies (ICTs) for their professional tasks. Through this study, we expect to offer a nuanced theoretical understanding about the nature of technostress creators and their impact on employee innovation. On the practical front, the study has implications for managers intending to design technology related managerial interventions.