Stress from Digital Work: Toward a Unified View of Digital Hindrance Stressors

There are many models with various sets of hindrance technostressors. Researchers and practitioners face the challenge of selecting a model or mixing several models without guidance on their relative advantages and suitability for contemporary digital work. None of the existing models captures the full conceptual breadth of hindrance technostress, and the existing models typically offer suboptimal power to explain the negative psychological responses or outcomes of technostressors. We synthesize the fragmented works on hindrance technostressors and propose a unified hierarchical model of digital hindrance stressors. We provide an extensive and parsimonious measurement model with high predictive power. This work builds on technostress and occupational stress theory using a quantitative-dominant mixed-methods study. The empirical part of the study includes a qualitative prestudy and multiple surveys with more than 5,800 participants. The data support the modeling, validation, and benchmarking of the new models we introduce. We discuss the relative advantages of the models for research and practice and guide their selection.