The effects of technostress on academic commitment among first-year undergraduate students at an institution of higher education in South Africa

The objective of this study was to examine university students' technostress as it relates to their academic commitment in South Africa, in accordance with the technostress creators' model and the adapted organizational commitment model. Through an online survey, a closed-ended questionnaire was employed to collect data from a randomly selected sample of 199 first-year undergraduate students at a South African university of technology. The findings reveal that techno-complexity has a significantly direct negative relationship (-.74) with students' academic commitment. However, techno-uncertainty significantly positively (.42) impacts students' commitment. In addition, techno-invasion insignificantly positively impact (.11) on students' academic commitment. Interestingly, students' age negatively correlated with techno-complexity, with older students being less affected by the complexity of technology for learning. Surprisingly, time spend using information communication technologies is positively correlated with techno-uncertainty; thus, more time spent using information communication technologies is associated with more effect from techno-uncertainty. In addition, the findings revealed that gender differences significantly impacted on the differences in the levels of students' technostress, with techno-invasion being more highly perceived by male students. These findings may assist universities in implementing remote teaching and provide valuable insights for online and remote teaching for scholars. However, these findings have generalizability limitations as the study focused on one institution of higher education. Future longitudinal studies that include other universities are encouraged; such studies may determine technostress changes as the institutions migrate back to multimodal teaching and learning systems post-Covid 19.