The Bright and Dark Sides of Technostress: A Mixed-Methods Study Involving Healthcare IT

Can Leaders Prevent Technology From Backfiring? Empowering Leadership as a Double-Edged Sword for Technostress in Care

“…By showing that childcare workers are affected by technostress due to the emergent digital transformation of childcare (Yost and Fan, 2014 ), our study demonstrated that technostress also impacts individual job outcomes beyond the “usual suspects” in high-tech and/or business environments. In care professions, like childcare, ICT has been introduced more sudden compared to, for example, office jobs and blue-collar jobs, where such transformations have occurred more gradually (Califf et al, 2015 ; Fagerström et al, 2017 ). Another contribution to the contextualization of technostress is the empirical link with quality of care delivered.…”

“…To date, technostress research has been mostly restricted to contexts like government, industry (Ayyagari et al, 2011 ) and education (Wang W. et al, 2020 ; Penado Abilleira et al, 2021 ). However, technostress is an increasingly prevalent and severe phenomenon in care professions (Califf et al, 2015 ; Fagerström et al, 2017 ). Childcare workers in particular constitute a group whose work-related well-being is continuously challenged, since they are regularly confronted with physical complaints (e.g., noise, musculoskeletal complaints), emotional demands (e.g., emotional responses from children and parents), and operate in a highly regulated environment (Decker et al, 2002 ; Løvgren, 2016 ; Koch et al, 2017 ).…”

“…Like general stress, technostress is context specific La Torre et al ( 2019 ). By expanding the knowledge on technostress in care professions (Califf et al, 2015 ; Fagerström et al, 2017 ), this study furthers the work of Tarafdar et al ( 2015 ) on the contextualization of technostress, demonstrating that this phenomenon is not limited to high-tech or business environments (Wang W. et al, 2020 ), but also affect employees in sectors that are currently making significant ICT investments to improve their professional services (Yost and Fan, 2014 ) and have traditionally received less attention in this regard. Second, by accounting for empowering leadership we contribute to the growing literature on this leadership approach (Dinh et al, 2014 ; Cheong et al, 2019 ) and extend the emergent body of research on the importance of leadership in the contemporary ICT-infused workplace (Cortellazzo et al, 2019 ; Gardner et al, 2020 ; Iannotta et al, 2020 ).…”

“…Technostress seems increasingly prevalent and severe among care professionals. While several sectors have witnessed increases in the adoption and intensity of ICT in their work over the past few years, such transformations have been relatively abrupt in professional care, compared to government and business environments, where such transformations have occurred more gradually (Califf et al, 2015 ; Fagerström et al, 2017 ). In particular, many childcare organizations in recent years saw the introduction of digital parent environments (i.e., web-based page or app to share information about the child with their parents), the emergence of social media pages, and the digitization of administrative rules and procedures among other technological developments (Yost and Fan, 2014 ; Bauwens and Meyfroodt, 2021 ).…”

“…In childcare organizations, one of the main aspects of performance is quality of care delivered, or the extent to which effective care is provided to those who require it (Humphries et al, 2014 ). In person care environments, there are typically limits to the extent to which ICT tasks and care duties are compatible with one another (Califf et al, 2015 ). For example, changing diapers or feeding and playing with children is often difficult to combine with ICT tasks like handling administration and communicating with parent through social media.…”