Can technostressors be engaging ?: the salient role of employee personality

Although prior research has recognized the negative influence of technostressors on job related outcomes, we posit that this may not be universally true. Further, despite the established salience of individual differences in other contexts, insights into the influence of personality traits on the perceptions of technostressors, and their consequent impacts on job outcomes, is rather limited. Such insights would enable a deeper understanding about the effects of individual differences on job related outcomes. In this research, by leveraging the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality traits and grounding the research in Transactional Model of Stress and Coping (TMSC), we theorize the moderating influence of personality on the relationships between technostressors and one particular job outcome, namely - job engagement. Specifically, the study theorizes the mechanisms through which each of the personality traits of - openness-to-experience, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion, interacts with technostressors to have a different influence on job engagement. We test the theorized model in a field study based on a survey of senior organizational managers, who regularly use information and communication technologies (ICTs) for executing professional tasks. Though technostressors are generally associated with negative impacts, our results show that this is not true for job engagement. Moreover, for individuals with different personality traits, technostressors may result in positive or negative job engagement. The study thus contributes to the technostress literature - specifically - by acknowledging the salient role of individual differences, and the nature of outcome itself, in determining the impact of technostressors.