Always connected @ work. Technostress and well-being with academics

Abstract

Over the recent years, technology has emerged as a challenge to academics' well-being and performance, technostress being regarded as a “dark-side” of ICT. On the other hand, ICT brings benefits to the academics’ professional activity, making their work at a distance possible. Therefore, the main aim of the present paper is to analyse the way in which the effective use of technology and personal factors explain the well-being of higher education teachers at the workplace. A cross-sectional correlation research design was used for this study. The sample consisted of 1813 university teachers from public and private universities. The findings have shown that technology self-efficacy, core self-evaluations, performance expectancy, facilitating conditions, use of technology and technostress predict well-being at work, with technostress and the use of technology mediating this relationship. Our study also shows that The Use of the Technology Scale is a reliable and valid instrument for the assessment of the academic working context. The findings of this study represent a starting point for considering some strategic decisions at the level of human resources management in higher education institutions with respect to the use of IT tools.