The impact of teleworking technostress on satisfaction, anxiety and performance

Technostress and time spent online. A cross-cultural comparison for teachers and students

Introduction

Research shows that ICT is beneficial for academics and students, aiding in overcoming distance barriers, streamlining administration, and improving teaching and learning processes. However, the negative impact of technology, particularly technostress, are garnering attention. In the context of the concerns about technostress among higher education institutions (HEI), the aim of the study is to analyze the technostress creators and inhibitors for university teachers and students in different European countries. The topical concept of digital well-being is seen as "a subjective individual experience of optimal balance between the benefits and drawbacks obtained from mobile connectivity, focusing on the personal perception of what amount of time spent using technology is optimal so that well-being is preserved".

Method

To explore specific aspects related to use of technology, two - parallel online surveys for academics (N = 446) and students (N = 660) from four European countries (Romania, Germany, Norway, and Finland) were conducted between November 2022 - January 2023. The surveys included the Technostress scale and the Technostress Inhibitors Scale, the Technology self-efficacy Scale, and a questionnaire focusing on socio-demographic aspects, work experience, academic field, dimensions related to the actual use of technology and participants perception on the optimal use of technology for work, learning or personal tasks, in terms of the period of day/week and amount of time spent. We also inquired about the social support given and received when using technology and the formal and informal rules, expectations, policies, punishments, and rewards regarding the use of technology.

Results

The findings suggest that the perceived optimal use of technology is significantly lower than the actual use for all the contexts. Overuse of technology was associated with technostress. Our results also showed that technology self-efficacy and social support from colleagues and teachers are negatively associated with technostress. Country differences regarding technostress and time spent online were also observed.

Discussions

Despite the needed caution in interpreting the results because of the unbalanced sample size across countries, the results could be used to develop research and support interventions within European countries to promote digital well-being, a better work-life balance with further positive effects on academic satisfaction and work/learning productivity.

The indirect impact of the technostress subfactors on the satisfaction and desire to work from home

Introduction

Organizational digitalization is a phenomenon that is becoming more widespread and holistic; that is responsible for more employees being affected by digital work and working from home. While introducing remote work offers numerous economic benefits for organizations, this transition must be aligned with employees' needs rather than in an authoritarian manner. Our research aimed to investigate how sub-factors of technostress, directly and indirectly, influence the satisfaction and desire to work from home.

Methods

We conducted a cross-sectional survey with a sample of 361 office workers with at least two years of experience who have spent some time working from home. We checked our hypotheses with a path model.

Results

Our research found that techno-insecurity and techno-complexity have a minimal direct influence on the desire to work from home. However, the desire to work from home significantly decreases through various mediation pathways via the status sub-factor (which can be seen as one of the latent benefits of remote work) and through satisfaction with working from home. Our model explains 33.7% of the variance in the desire to work from home.

Discussion

This suggests that leaders have a task of great significance: to decrease the technostress employees are exposed to and to draw the attention of researchers to the fact that technostress has more complex indirect effects than previously assumed.

Positive mental health of Latin American university professors: A scientific framework for intervention and improvement

The post-pandemic stage covid-19 has revealed overloads, ambiguities, and conflicts of teachers in the performance of new roles in hybrid classrooms that demanded an urgent adaptation, this highlighted the need for priority attention to the mental health of teachers, however, there are still insufficient studies that transcend the diagnosis and are committed to establish proposals for improvement. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to establish a proposal for the promotion of positive mental health (PMH). METHODS: The study was deployed from a qualitative approach; using an ethnomethodological design that allowed studying how teachers create meanings and sense in their work context, an appreciative interview was conducted with an affirmative theme that allowed teachers to expose their experiences that were systematized and processed with ATLAS. ti software. The application of the interview was conducted online through a Google form, during the months of February and March 2023. Three hundred university professors who experienced the pandemic in universities in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru participated, based on a convenience sampling. RESULTS: The results of the deductive phase confirmed Lluch's PMH theoretical framework; however, new nuances or variations have been identified, which must be considered in the complex and dynamic nature of each PMH factor. From there, the results of the inductive phase allowed revealing emerging concepts, that is, new categories that would have the function of improving the PMH factors, which is why they have been denominated: dynamizing nuclei. PMH dynamizing nuclei are adjustment to work environment, soft skills, work-family balance, self-motivation, self-efficacy, subjective well-being, proactive strategies, engagement, resilience. CONCLUSIONS: Finally, with the results of both phases, the creation of an integrated model was generated, which was evaluated by six experts in a round of feedback, who highlighted the relevance of the findings and offered recommendations that were considered in the study. The new integrated model has revealed an interesting association, since it not only legitimizes the PMH's dynamizing cores, but also informs on which specific factor of the PMH these cores have the greatest impact, which has a high guiding value for intervention and improvement based on focused strategies.