Technostressors and employee innovation : examining the linear and curvilinear relationships

Motivated by the increasing use of technologies by organizations and the practical need for understanding the associated technostress amongst employees, recent years have seen a significant growth in technostress research. Despite this increased research on technostress, two gaps are particularly noteworthy. First, though prior studies have described ‘technostressors' through the five dimensions --- techno-overload, techno- invasion, techno-complexity, techno-insecurity, and techno-uncertainty, in an aggregated way, the individual impact of each of these technostressor dimensions on job outcomes has not received enough attention. Second, though past research on stress and coping suggests an inverted U-shaped relationship between stress and job outcomes as described through the Yerkes-Dodson Law, this relationship has not been examined for the technostress context. Grounding our arguments in the ‘control theory of occupational stress', we theorize and test linear and curvilinear relationships of individual technostressors with employee innovation performance via a field survey of senior organizational employees who regularly use information and communication technologies (ICTs) for their professional tasks. Through this study, we offer a nuanced theoretical understanding about the nature of individual technostressors and their relationship with employee innovation. On the practical front, the study has implications for managers intending to design technology related managerial interventions.