Understanding the Dynamic and Episodic Nature of Technostressors and Their Effects on Cyberdeviance: A Daily Field Investigation

Technostress is an emerging topic in the information systems (IS) literature. Prior studies have mostly adopted a static approach to capturing snapshots of technostressors, without considering their dynamic and episodic nature. Daily technostress is often the product of discrete events encountered in the workplace that shape employees’ momentary affect and behaviors in situ. To lay the conceptual foundation for understanding deviant behaviors, this study integrates the self-regulation perspective into the transactional model of stress and conducts a contextualized, longitudinal, and daily investigation of how and when daily perceived technostressors affect employees’ daily cyberdeviant behaviors (i.e., cyberdeviance). In a time-lagged experience sampling study of 188 professionals who completed a survey three times a day for two weeks, we found that employees experiencing daily techno-overload and techno-invasion are likely to engage in daily cyberdeviance to cope with their daily exhaustion. We also examined the cross-level moderating effect of an individual trait (i.e., technology self-efficacy) on the strength of the within-person process model of daily cyberdeviance. Our multilevel analysis results showed that technology self-efficacy alleviated employees’ daily exhaustion induced by daily techno-overload. This study theoretically contributes to the IS literature by providing a theoretical explanation of the underlying mechanisms of techno-overload, techno-invasion, and employees’ cyberdeviance, in addition to using a within-person approach to understand the dynamic and episodic nature of these technostressors.