Technostress: negative effect on performance and possible mitigations

Abstract We investigate the effect of conditions that create technostress, on technology‐enabled innovation, technology‐enabled performance and overall performance. We further look at the role of technology self‐efficacy, organizational mechanisms that inhibit technostress and technology competence as possible mitigations to the effects of technostress creators. Our findings show a negative association between technostress creators and performance. We find that, while traditional effort‐based mechanisms such as building technology competence reduce the impact of technostress creators on technology‐enabled innovation and performance, more empowering mechanisms such as developing technology self‐efficacy and information systems (IS) literacy enhancement and involvement in IS initiatives are required to counter the decrease in overall performance because of technostress creators. Noting that the professional sales context offers increasingly high expectations for technology‐enabled performance in an inherently interpersonal‐oriented and relationship‐oriented environment with regard to overall performance, and high failure rates for IS acceptance/use, the study uses survey data collected from 237 institutional sales professionals.