The Dark Side of Technology Use: The Relationship Between Technostress Creators, Employee Work-Life Balance, and Job Burnout While Working Remotely During the COVID-19 Lockdown

Abstract

Rapid progress of digital technologies and their increasing spreading into the work domain have been the subject of turbulent discussions for the last decade. The adaptation and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) led to redefinition of organisational structures and the way employees work, making it possible to connect anytime, anywhere and deliver data in real time. Recently, the use of ICTs for working purposes has increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The spread of COVID-19 has been changing working habits around the world with employers encouraging or even insisting that employees work remotely. As such, work is mainly based on ICT use while experiencing some technology-related job demands, which are generally named techno-stressors or technostress creators. Previous research provides some evidence that the ubiquity of technologies can add to employees experiencing technostress because of the increased workload, excessive technology dependence, demands for enhanced productivity, and a constant need to adapt to emerging ICT applications, functionalities, and workflows. There is still a gap in the literature about the impact of technology use on employee well-being while working remotely during the COVID-19 lockdown. This chapter aims at revealing the relationship between the construct of technostress creators, including its five dimensions, and employee well-being in terms of work-life balance and job burnout. In doing this, quantitative data were collected in Lithuania. The results support the idea that technostress creators have a negative effect on employee well-being. Moreover, the findings suggest that techno-overload and techno-invasion reduce work-life balance and lead to job burnout. The chapter has strong practical implications seeing that the results are in line with the idea that organisations should create and implement policies and practices for reducing the impact of technostress creators.