Weltweiter Status von Technostress

Abstract

Information and communication technology can certainly make everyday work easier for users and bring numerous advantages, such as mobile working. These advantages are also evident for organisations in the form of savings in operating costs and greater efficiency. Despite this intention to simplify everyday work, ICT also has disadvantages. Individuals have to adapt to the technologies, which can cause them anxiety. If they are unable to adapt sufficiently, users experience technostress. This technostress can be measured using various methods. One of the measurement tools is the self-report by Tarafdar et al. (2007) and Ragu-Nathan et al. (2008). The questionnaire covers the five technostress creators: techno-overload, techno-invasion, techno-complexity, techno-insecurity and techno-uncertainty. The self-report has already been used in numerous studies by various authors around the world for their surveys. By specifying the mean values, the surveys enable a comparison between them. The aim of this thesis is therefore to compare the phenomenon of technostress over time. Furthermore, it aims to show whether demographic factors have an influence on perceived technostress. In order to answer the research questions, the method of literature review was chosen. This thesis is divided into five main chapters. The first chapter contains the introduction. It deals with the problem definition, the objective, methodology, and the structure of the thesis. The second chapter provides the theoretical background and shows the definition of technostress, its causes, the technostress creators, and various measurement instruments for technostress. The third and fourth chapters provide the literature review and its results. The fifth chapter draws a conclusion and provides an outlook. In the literature search, five databases were first searched using keywords, yielding 1,413 hits. After full-text analysis, 98 publications were identified that used the questionnaire by Tarafdar et al. (2007) or Ragu-Nathan et al. (2008) and included mean values for their results. The results of this study show that the overall value of technostress, as well as technostress creators, with the exception of techno-uncertainty, show a slight upward trend over the period from the first survey in 2005 to 2024. Techno-uncertainty, on the other hand, shows a downward trend. However, a uniform development trend cannot be identified, as the curves often overlap and show fluctuations. Furthermore, it can be shown that the demographic factors of gender, age and level of education have an influence on technostress. However, the literature reports contradictory results in this regard, which indicates a strong context dependency.

Date of Award	2025
Original language	German (Austria)
Awarding Institution	Johannes Kepler University Linz
Supervisor	René Riedl (Supervisor)