Does Technostress cause Procrastination – The Dark Side of Technology

Abstract

The use of Technology at the work place aims to make the organizational processes efficient. However, the study
focuses on the dark side of technology i.e. Technostress in employees which is an emergent phenomenon with
increased focus on use of technology in the Post COVID-19 time. This study focuses on the behavioral side of the
employees that emerges due to Technostress. This causal study quantifies the impact of Technology Related Stress
i.e. Technostress on employees making a delay in work i.e. Procrastination. For the present study, based on
convenience and snowball sampling, the data was collected from 390 employees who have day-to-day interaction
with Information Communication Technology ICT. These employees were from the Telecommunication Industry
and Software Houses. Following the research work of Nimrod (2018), Technostress has been operationalized
having five dimension namely - Overload, Invasion, Complexity, Privacy and Inclusion while Procrastination
was measured using Metin, Taris, and Peeters (2015). The results reflect a significant positive association of
Overload, Invasion, Complexity and Privacy with procrastination while Inclusion was found to be statistically
insignificant. Hence, the shady side of technology persists and the organizations need to ensure that technology
adoption does not stress its employees to an extent that they start stalling work. For this, it is proposed that
Technostress management trainings be organized to ensure the employees are well equipped to address the
challenges proposed by Technostress at the work place.