A refined examination of worker age and stress: Explaining how, and why, older workers are especially techno-stressed in the interruption age

Abstract

The workforce is aging rapidly, with the number of older workers increasing sharply (older being defined as 60 and over). At the same time, interruptions mediated by modern information technologies are proliferating in organizations. These interruptions include email notifications and instant messages, amongst others, which have been shown to have hazardous consequences for employees in terms of stress. Older workers might be especially affected by these interruptions, implying major problems for this fast-growing user group with regard to their well-being and work performance. The present study tests a research model suggesting that older workers experience more interruption-based technostress than their younger counterparts because of differences in inhibitory control between older and younger adults. In doing so, this study answers recent calls for examining age as a substantive variable in IS research, and it contributes to the literature on technostress by showing how technostress affects different user groups to different extents.