Emergence of technostress among employees working with physical robots

Despite the growing body of literature on technostress, there is limited knowledge about the emergence of technostress among people working with physical robots. In this paper, we aim to address this research gap by exploring how technostress emerges among employees working with physical robots. The study was based on qualitative online questionnaire responses from 197 present or previous users of robots at work. Based on our data, we identified several robot-related environmental conditions that contributed to perceived work-related stress. Our findings reveal that the emergence of technostress among employees working with physical robots has distinct characteristics and that the technostr…

Exploring Early Adolescents' Problem-Focused Strategies for Coping With Stressful IT Use Experiences

In today’s technology-oriented world, individuals’ ability to cope with information technology (IT) has become increasingly important. This is especially relevant for early adolescents, who are expected to use IT from an early age on as part of their everyday lives. Although early adolescents’ IT use and its outcomes have been studied, their related coping strategies have received less attention. The current study focuses on early adolescents’ problem-focused strategies used to cope with stressful IT use experiences. The underlying data consist of semistructured interviews with 31 early adolescents. The results show that the strategies used by early adolescents differ in terms of their perv…

Proximal and distal antecedents of problematic information technology use in organizations

PurposeExcessive use of work-related information technology (IT) devices can lead to major performance and well-being concerns for organizations. Extant research has provided evidence of the incidence of such problematic IT use in organizations. We extend the understanding of problematic IT use by examining its individual (proximal) and organizational (distal) antecedents.Design/methodology/approachDrawing from the self-worth theory and the concept of fear of being left behind, we address proximal antecedents that lead to problematic IT use. Drawing from the concept of autonomy paradox, we address distal antecedents of problematic IT use through a positive association with the two proximal …

The Globalization Competence Assessment Framework

The goal of this paper is to recommend suitable competence assessment instruments and methods for assessing globalization competence in the Information Systems domain. This is done by matching globalization competences with suitable competence assessment methods. The results of the analysis indicate that the most applicable competence assessment methods for assessing globalization competences in the Information Systems domain are written format assessments (especially essays), candidate self-reports, live interactions (especially group work), and computer simulations. The validity of the outcome is confirmed through a mixed method of document analysis and expert interviews by analyzing and …

Global social knowledge management: from barriers to the selection of social tools

Web 2.0 and Social Software revolutionize the knowledge exchange within and between organizations. This is one of the claims consultants and software vendors in the field have made. But have the promises been kept and has evidence been achieved so far, in particular for knowledge management in globally distributed settings? As a starting point, our paper introduces the field of Global Social Knowledge Management (GSKM). We see this area as one of the main research area for future research in the Knowledge Management domain. A variety of social software applications have already been seen promising and incorporated into the context of knowledge management (Avram 2006; Zheng and Zheng 2010; L…

Distress, Eustress, or No Stress? Explaining Smartphone Users' Different Technostress Responses

Technostress is common and has harmful consequences. Therefore, researchers have shown increasing interest in explaining technostress in the field of information systems (IS). While extant research merits in identifying the causes and consequences of technostress, it has not explained empirically why information technology (IT) users have different responses to similar potentially stressful IT events. Indeed, events such as smartphone failures can derive negative distress responses for some users and positive eustress responses for others. To address this gap in research, we conducted a qualitative study by interviewing users who had experienced smartphone failures. As a contribution, our f…

Flow barriers : What prevents software developers from experiencing flow in their work

Software development requires high problem-solving skills and creativity, making it a profession with good opportunities to become immersed in a flow experience. The characteristics of flow experience are absorption, enjoyment, and intrinsic motivation toward the activity. This study aims to better understand the barriers that prevent software developers from experiencing flow at work. Previous research has mostly examined software developers’ productivity, flow being one component of productive workdays. This study addresses the research gap by exploring the barriers to experiencing flow in software development. A qualitative questionnaire was used to gather data about flow experiences fro…

Two decades of the dark side in the information systems basket: suggesting five areas for future research

Despite its benefits, information technology (IT) use is associated with serious negative effects on individuals. For example, technostress and IT addiction can harm IT users’ organizational performance and everyday well-being. Such dark side phenomena have become more evident since IT has transmuted into a major component of humans’ job routines and private lives. However, since current information systems (IS) research on the dark side is in an early and fragmented stage, there is a need for a synthesis. To address this need, we conducted a literature review of 37 articles published in the IS basket journals between 1995 and 2015. We detected four key phenomena: technostress, information …

A Barrier Framework for open E-Learning in public administrations

A comprehensive literature review on E-Learning and OER in public administrations.A contextualized Barrier Framework about core barriers in the public sector.Lessons learned to improve implementation and adoption processes of open E-Learning.The relevance of organizational, social and technical barriers in the public sector. E-Learning and openness in education are receiving ever increasing attention in businesses as well as in academia. However, these practices have only to small extent been introduced in public administrations. The study addresses this gap by presenting a literature review on Open Educational Resources OER and E-Learning in the public sector. The main goal of the article …

Overcoming Cultural Distance in Social OER Environments

Open educational resources (OERs) provide opportunities as enablers of societal development, but they also create new challenges. From the perspective of content providers and educational institutions, particularly, cultural and context-related challenges emerge. Even though barriers regarding large-scale adoption of OERs are widely discussed, empirical evidence for determining challenges in relation to particular contexts is still rare. Such context-specific barriers generally can jeopardize the acceptance of OERs and, in particular, social OER environments. We conducted a large-scale (N = 855) cross-European investigation in the school context to determine how teachers and learners percei…

Mitigating technostress is not easy, but it’s doable

Although personal use of digital technologies is often characterised as fun and voluntary, technostress is anything but. Floods of push notifications and information from personal devices and the constant pressure to be available online can contribute to poor well-being, fatigue, and concentration problems. Markus Salo, Henri Pirkkalainen, Cecil Chua and Tiina Koskelainen explain how technostress develops over time and how users can mitigate it. nonPeerReviewed

Deliberate or Instinctive? : Proactive and Reactive Coping for Technostress

Employees in organizations face technostress that is, stress from information technology (IT) use. Although technostress is a highly prevalent organizational phenomenon, there is a lack of theory-based understanding on how IT users can cope with it. We theorize and validate a model for deliberate proactive and instinctive reactive coping for technostress. Drawing from theories on coping, our model posits that the reactive coping behaviors of distress venting and distancing from IT can alleviate technostress by diminishing the negative effect of technostress creators on IT-enabled productivity. The proactive coping behaviors of positive reinterpretation and IT control can help IT users by in…

Technostress and Social Networking Services: Uncovering Strains and Their Underlying Stressors

Numerous users of social networking sites and services (SNS) suffer from technostress and its various strains that hinder well-being. Despite a growing research interest on technostress, the extant studies have not explained what kinds of various strains can SNS use create and how can these strains be traced back to different stressors. To address this gap in research, we employed a qualitative approach by narrative interviews. As a contribution, our findings introduce four SNS strains (concentration problems, sleep problems, identity problems, and social relation problems) and explain how they link with different underlying SNS stressors. As practical implications, the findings of this stu…

THE EMERGENCE OF OPEN SCHOOL EDUCATION: THE CASE OF OPEN DISCOVERY SPACE PORTAL

Nowadays, open schooling is considered an education paradigm with increasing popularity, which focuses on the learners and offers more freedom in education outside of the physical and other types of barriers such as accessibility, flexibility, affordability and availability of teacher/tutors, classrooms, schools and educational institutions. The main elements that define Open Schooling are flexible learning, based on fully exploring the potential of ICT to improve education and training systems quality and efficiency, aligning them with the current trends on ICT in education, distant learning and life-long training. The aim of this paper is to present the current status of Open Schooling ma…

Technostress and social networking services: Explaining users' concentration, sleep, identity, and social relation problems

It is common for users of social networking sites and services (SNS) to suffer from technostress and the various associated strains that hinder their well‐being. Despite prior SNS stress studies having provided valuable knowledge regarding SNS stressors and their use consequences, they have not examined the various strains related to well‐being that those stressors can create nor the underlying SNS characteristics. To address this gap in the research, we used a qualitative approach involving narrative interviews. As a contribution, our findings reveal four types of strains related to well‐being (concentration problems, sleep problems, identity problems, and social relation problems) as well…

Understanding Social OER Environments—A Quantitative Study on Factors Influencing the Motivation to Share and Collaborate

Social software environments are increasingly used for open education: teachers and learners share and collaborate in these environments. While there are various possibilities for the inclusion of such social functionalities for OER, many organizational, individual and technological challenges can hinder the motivation of teachers to share and collaborate in these environments. Current research cannot explain what barriers teachers face in social OER environments and how those challenges influence their motivation to engage in such environments. An exploratory factor analysis was used in the context of schools and higher education institutions to investigate the possible barriers to engagin…

Social media overload, exhaustion, and use discontinuance : Examining the effects of information overload, system feature overload, and social overload

While users’ discontinuance of use has posed a challenge for social media in recent years, there is a paucity of knowledge on the relationships between different dimensions of overload and how overload adversely affects users’ social media discontinuance behaviors. To address this knowledge gap, this study employed the stressor–strain–outcome (SSO) framework to explain social media discontinuance behaviors from an overload perspective. It also conceptualized social media overload as a multidimensional construct consisting of system feature overload, information overload, and social overload. The proposed research model was empirically validated via 412 valid questionnaire responses collecte…

Enhancing the experience of online users of open education

The limited adoption of Open Educational Resources (OER) has kicked off the launch of several projects to search for possible solutions. One of these projects is “Open Educational Ideas and Innovations” (OEI2). The goal of this project is to find alternatives for increasing the uptake of OER and facilitating the collaborative development of OER. To enhance the experience of the users of open education, we interviewed twelve educators and researchers from different higher education institutions across Europe focusing on gathering insights about idea sharing experiences. In this paper, we present our key findings based on these interviews and outline some recommendations for our next open edu…

Taking on the “Dark Side” : Coping With Technostress

Technostress is stress that individuals experience due to their use of information technology. It is associated with critical workplace consequences including reduced productivity. While the negative consequences are well known, what is less understood is how individuals can cope with technostress to alleviate them. We report on two studies that explain how organizational IT users can cope with technostress. The first is a qualitative study conducted in the U.K., by interviewing thirty executives/knowledge workers. Here, we identified seven coping behaviors that individuals engage in, in response to technostress. The second is a survey of 846 U.S. employees who use IT in their workplace. He…

Contextualization of Open Educational Resources in Asia and Europe

Open Educational Resources (OER) are a promising concept for international collaborations: sharing, utilizing, and collaborating around OER across borders might help educational institutions and their staff to internationalize their activities. However, several barriers exist keeping stakeholders away from engaging in international collaborations. In this paper, we discuss the main challenges of OER uptake in international settings. Three case studies show potential solutions for OER uptake and collaboration in the European-Asian context. The case studies identify good practices, success factors and challenges. This paper provides a starting point for systematic analytical as well as design…

Teknostressi häiritsee keskittymistä, unta ja ihmissuhteita, mutta sen torjumiseen on keinonsa

Teknologian liiallisen käytön aiheuttama stressi eli teknostressi kuormittaa monia työssä ja vapaa-ajalla. Vaikka esimerkiksi sosiaalisen median käyttäminen tuntuu ihmisistä usein mukavalta, pitkän päälle se myös tuottaa stressiä, heikentää keskittymiskykyä ja vie energiaa muulta elämältä. Teknostressiä voi kuitenkin lievittää muutamalla yksinkertaisella keinolla. nonPeerReviewed

IT engagement as a blessing and a curse? Examining its antecedents and outcomes in organizations

Information technology (IT) engagement is defined as a need to spend more time using IT. Practice-based examples show that IT engagement can have adverse effects in organizations. Although users can potentially get more work done through IT engagement, observations show that the users might jeopardize their well-being and hamper their work performance. We aimed to investigate this complexity in the research on IT engagement by examining its potential antecedents and outcomes in organizations. Considering the potentially mixed outcomes, we developed a model to examine the effects of IT engagement on personal productivity and strain. We also aimed to explain the antecedents of IT engagement b…

Skill-Based Scouting of Open Management Content

Already existing open educational resources in management have a high potential for enterprises to address the increasing training needs of their employees. However, access barriers still prevent the full exploitation of this potential. Users have to search a number of repositories with heterogeneous interfaces in order to retrieve the desired content. In addition, the use of search criteria related to skills, such as learning objectives and skill-levels is in most cases not supported. The demonstrator presented in this paper addresses these shortcomings by federating multiple repositories, integrating and enriching their metadata, and employing skill-based search for management related con…

The Knowledge Intervention Integration Process

Process oriented Knowledge Management (pKM) has been a widely discussed approach for KM initiatives. The approach ties business strategy closely to KM by connecting knowledge activities to key business processes. Social Software has been taken up in many domains as an organizational tool for managing knowledge. Up till now, the impact of being globally distributed (organizations and teams) has not been emphasized within the pKM view, nor has been the Social Software approach. The globally distributed, Social Software – supported approach has clear impacts for designing and implementing KM processes in the pKM view. Within this paper the authors clarify these implications with an integrated …

Globally distributed knowledge sharing in social software environments : barriers and interventions

Formation and Mitigation of Technostress in the Personal Use of IT

Understanding information technology (IT) use is vital for the information systems (IS) discipline due to its substantial positive and negative consequences. In recent years, IT use for personal purposes has grown rapidly. Although personal use is voluntary and can often reflect fun, technostress is a common negative consequence of such use. When left unaddressed, technostress can cause serious harm to IT users. However, prior research has not explained how technostress forms over time or how its mitigation takes place in a personal—rather than organizational—environment. To address these research gaps, we conducted a qualitative study with narrative interviews of IT users who had experienc…

Employees’ challenges and needs for reskilling when working with software robots

Software robots are becoming increasingly adopted in different industries. The growing rate of automatization will affect more and more people and will result in changes in businesses of all sizes. Impacts can be observed at both the organizational and individual employee levels. A growing number of studies of software robots’ advantages and disadvantages on an organizational or industry-specific level have been carried out. However, there is limited knowledge about the employees’ perceptions of challenges and new skills needed when working with software robots. This study addresses this gap by using open-ended questionnaire responses from employees who have worked with software robots. Thi…

The emergence of technostress in software development work: Technostressors and underlying factors

Software development is a fast-growing market that is heavily tied to information technology (IT) use. Despite the high utilization of IT and high stress levels of software developers, research has largely neglected the effect of IT use on stress experienced by software developers. To address this gap in the research, we employ the concept of technostress. Prior technostress research has found many technostress-creating factors that cause severe negative consequences for both organizations and their employees. Despite these advancements, little is known about how technostress emerges in different organizational contexts and the underlying factors behind the technostress creators in these co…

Taking on the “Dark Side”–Coping With Technostress

Technostress is stress that individuals experience due to their use of information technology. It is associated with critical workplace consequences including reduced productivity. While the negative consequences are well known, what is less understood is how individuals can cope with technostress to alleviate them. We report on two studies that explain how organizational IT users can cope with technostress. The first is a qualitative study conducted in the U.K., by interviewing thirty executives/knowledge workers. Here, we identified seven coping behaviors that individuals engage in, in response to technostress. The second is a survey of 846 U.S. employees who use IT in their workplace. He…

How to get things done in social virtual reality : A study of team cohesion in social virtual reality–enabled teams

Social virtual reality (SVR) enables teams to operate in a virtual environment that simulates and enhances real-world interactions. However, there is an absence of empirical analysis of how SVR can affect the performance of virtual teams. This paper documents how SVR affects the formation of team cohesion (i.e., task cohesion and social cohesion), which is a critical success factor for team performance. To address this gap in the research, we conducted a qualitative study by interviewing 20 members from virtual teams assigned to perform a challenging collaborative task in SVR. As a contribution, our study identifies five primary affordances and 11 sub-affordances for team cohesion in SVR. W…

Exploring early adolescents’ stressful IT use experiences

Early adolescents are accustomed to using information technology (IT) for different purposes as a part of their everyday life. While IT use can provide many benefits, it can also include negative experiences, such as feelings of stress (i.e. technostress). Considering that young IT users’ technostress perspectives have remained limited in the literature, this paper attempts to contrast their experiences with aspects from earlier research. A qualitative content analysis of semi-structured interviews with 31 primary and secondary school students reveals that early adolescents have encountered stressful IT use experiences that vary based on the degree of stress. The experiences relate to diffe…

Examining Competing Entrepreneurial Concerns in a Social Question and Answer (SQA) Platform

This study aims to determine the competing concerns of people interested in startup development and entrepreneurship by using topic modeling and sentiment analysis on a social question-and-answer (SQA) website. Understanding the underlying concerns of startup entrepreneurs is critical to society and economic growth. Therefore, greater scientific support for entrepreneurship remains necessary, including data mining from virtual social communities. In this study, an SQA platform was used to identify the sentiment of thirty concerns of people interested in startup entrepreneurship. Based on topic modeling and sentiment analysis of 18819 inquiries in various forums on an SQA, we identified addi…

Coping with technostress: when emotional responses fail

In this study, we develop two new perspectives for technostress mitigation from the viewpoint of coping. First, we examine users’ emotional coping responses to stressful IT, focusing specifically on distress venting and distancing from IT. As these mechanisms may not always be effective for individuals’ well-being, we extend our approach to self-regulation in coping, which concerns general stress-resistance. Thus, we specifically study how IT control moderates the effect of emotional coping responses to stressful situations involving IT use. We test the proposed model in a cross-sectional study of IT users from multiple organizations (N=1,091). The study contributes to information systems l…

Design principles for collaboration platforms for open education

Increasing the current low uptake of Open Education Resources (OER) is a key challenge for researchers and practitioners in the field. User studies have shown that collaboration is a main success factor for successful open educational activities. However, effective collaboration in open educational contexts requires well planned processes and platforms supporting collaboration, in particular in physically distributed settings. We have been investigating the value of such platforms, their main features and user requirements to enable collaboration from immature ideas to completed resources. We used quantitative and qualitative research methods to collect insights from potential users of such…

Removing the barriers to adoption of social OER environments

Despite the opportunities and benefits of OER, research and practice has shown how the OER repositories have a hard time in reaching an active user-base. The opportunities of experience exchange and simple feedback mechanisms of social software have been realized for improving the situation and many are basing or transforming their OER offerings towards socially powered environments. Research on social software has shown how knowledge-sharing barriers in online environments are highly culture and context-specific and require proper investigation. It is crucial to study what challenges might arise in such environments and how to overcome them, ensuring a successful uptake. A large-scale (N =…

Professional social media-enabled productivity : a five-wave longitudinal study on the role of professional social media invasion, work engagement and work exhaustion

PurposeSocial media platforms are increasingly used at work to facilitate work-related activities and can either challenge or make people feel more productive at jobs. This study drew from technostress and employee well-being literature and analyzed longitudinal effects of professional social media (PSM) invasion, work engagement and work exhaustion on PSM-enabled productivity.Design/methodology/approachNationally representative five-wave survey data of Finnish employees were analyzed with hybrid multilevel linear regression analysis. Outcome measure was PSM-enabled productivity and the predictors included PSM invasion, work exhaustion and work engagement. Age, gender, education, occupation…

Explaining information technology users’ ways of mitigating technostress

Technostress refers to the inability of an individual to deal with information technology (IT) in a healthy manner. Researchers, practitioners, and medical professionals have emphasized the omnipresence of technostress and its severe outcomes, including poor well-being and burnout. Despite the importance of the phenomenon, prior research has paid limited attention to how technostress can be mitigated. The few existing studies examine organizational mitigation mechanisms, but we could not find any studies that focus on individual IT users’ own ways of mitigating technostress outside of work. To address the research gap, we conducted a qualitative study to uncover users’ ways of mitigating te…

A novel approach towards skill-based search and services of Open Educational Resources

Open educational resources (OER) have a high potential to address the growing need for training materials in management education and training. Today, a high number of OER in management are already available in a large number of repositories. However, users face barriers as they have to search repository by repository with different interfaces to retrieve the appropriate learning content. In addition, the use of search criteria related to skills, such as learning objectives and skill-levels is not generally supported. The European co-funded project OpenScout addresses these barriers by intelligently connecting leading European OER repositories and providing federated, skillbased search and …

One More, One More... You Get Stuck" : The Role of Craving in Smartphone-Related Technostress

Smartphones have been integrated into nearly every aspect of human life. Because of them, being entertained, communicating with others, and finding information has never been easier. Even though such possibilities are positive on the surface, the versatile nature of smartphones has also created issues, such as people using them compulsively or excessively. By collecting and analyzing data from 30 semistructured interviews, we explored how users may experience craving unstoppable/uncontrollable desire to use, despite the negative consequences) that make them use smartphones compulsively or excessively. Such use may eventually lead to technostress, which is stress caused by technology use. We…

Älylaitteet ja stressi: Aiheuttajat, seuraukset ja hallintakeinot