Abstract
To investigate the phenomenon of technostress among university teachers in higher education, a multidimensional person-environment misfit framework of technostress was proposed and validated by 343 teachers from universities in China. The findings indicate that person-organization (P-O) misfit, person-technology (P-T) misfit, and person-people (P-P) misfit largely captured how university teachers interact with multiple dimensions of the higher education environment in an imbalanced way that causes technostress. P-O misfit predicted P-T misfit and P-P misfit. Relationships between multidimensional technostress and job performance were investigated. It was found that university requirements related to the use of ICT and the suitability of ICT for university teachers’ work were critical factors affecting their job performance. In addition, a comparison was made among university teachers from different grade levels, revealing that university management related to ICT use tended to affect university teachers of higher-grade levels more than those of lower-grade levels in generating technostress.
Highlights
Universities worldwide have been advancing their agendas for education enhanced by information and communication technologies (ICT), such as promoting mobile learning, blended learning, and virtual reality-based instruction (Markowitz et al, 2018; Qi, 2019)
The whole dataset was split based on university teachers’ grade levels as higher-grade courses have more complicated knowledge structures and those teaching higher-grade courses are often senior teachers, being more likely to be subjected to technostress (McIver et al, 2016)
Multi-group comparisons were carried out on the sub-datasets to examine whether there were any possible differences regarding technostress among university teachers of different grade levels, the knowledge of which could inform the development of targeted countermeasures against technostress
Summary
Universities worldwide have been advancing their agendas for education enhanced by information and communication technologies (ICT), such as promoting mobile learning, blended learning, and virtual reality-based instruction (Markowitz et al, 2018; Qi, 2019). These efforts are laudable and could potentially benefit learners. They could exert increased pressure on university teachers who are often less technology-savvy than their students (Jena, 2015; Hatlevik and Hatlevik, 2018), but have to constantly adapt themselves to the ever-demanding university requirements related to the use of technologies at work, which is exacerbated by the rapid changes and advancement of ICT.
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