A Technology-Individual Contingency Perspective of Mobile Technostress: The Moderating Role of Personality

As one of the rapidly developing technologies, mobile technology brings employees not only the enhanced work effectiveness and efficiency but also some unexpected consequences such as the so called technostress which has been regarded as an increasingly serious issue in contemporary organizations. Despite prior studies have provided some interpretive and qualitative analysis on this issue, the empirical studies about how and when mobile technology features lead to technostress have been rarely developed. In this study, we proposed and empirically examined the impact of one key mobile technology feature namely presenteeism on technostress. More importantly, we further put forward that the relationship between technology characteristic and technostress was moderated by five personality factors namely extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience by addressing the Five Factor Model (FFM) of personality. A survey on the employees with usage of mobile technologies in workplace was conducted to test the proposed research model and hypotheses. The key findings show that: (1) Presenteeism per se has no significant impact on technostress; (2) Three personality factors conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience are found to be significantly moderate the relationship between presenteeism and technostress while the other two does not. Contributions and implications of the study are also discussed.