How do Users Cope with Technostress over Time? A Longitudinal Study Investigating the Intra-individual Effects of Technostress Mitigation

Users of Information Technology (IT) perceive the challenge of IT-related stress, called technostress. To mitigate the challenge of technostress, users aim to cope by performing behavioral, cognitional, and perceptual efforts. However, past research about coping and technostress neglects the temporal nature of the effect of technostress and coping already discussed in the psychological literature. Even though coping theory was initially construed as being dynamic and transactional in nature, most models of coping in the technostress context have been unidirectional and have treated coping as a static outcome. The following example demonstrates the temporal relationship between technostress and coping — users who suffered from technostress in the past, cope with it currently in order to reduce it in the future. Consequently, IS research has only little understanding of the changing of technostress and the mitigation effect of coping over time. Therefore, the present research-in-progress paper aims to investigate the effect of coping on technostress over time. It thereby follows recent research calls (e.g., Pirkkalainen et al. 2019; Stich et al. 2019), all calling for an investigation of technostress and coping over time using a longitudinal research design. The research-in-progress paper draws on a Latent Growth Modeling (LGM) approach to investigate the trajectory of coping as well as technostress with being able to reveal their changing relationship over time. The results will give insight into the change over time of technostress and coping within individuals