The mediating roles of strain facets and coping strategies in translating techno-stressors into adverse job outcomes

Abstract

The aim of this study is to explain how techno-stressors, such as techno-invasion and techno-overload, translate through strain facets and coping strategy choices into negative workplace outcomes, such as work exhaustion. Understanding these mediating mechanisms is important since it allows the development of interventions targeting such translational factors and possibly alleviating the negative outcomes of inevitable techno-stressors in the workplace. To this end, we develop a stress dynamics and coping model based on Lazarus' work and test it with structural equation modeling techniques applied to survey data from a sample of 242 employees of a large organization in the United States. The findings lend support to the application of the stress dynamics and coping theory to the case of techno-stress. The findings specifically reveal that techno-invasion and techno-overload drive respectively the strain facets of work-family conflict and distress, and that people respond to these strain facets with a mix of adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies, but mostly with maladaptive ones. The findings further reveal that adaptive coping strategies reduce work exhaustion, and maladaptive ones increase it. Hence, one's choice of coping strategies is a possibly modifiable target that influences and conceivably controls the translations of techno-stressors into adverse job outcomes.